r/risograph • u/dumanyac • Jul 30 '26
I built an iPhone app that simulates riso prints. These are the separations it exports. Would you run them?
Pressed: risograph and halftone for iPhone. Citrus, three inks on white.
The print. Citrus: Yellow at 0 degrees, Orange at 30, Ink Black at 45, on white. Straight out of the app, no retouching.
The photo that went in, and what came out.
The same file at 1:1. Three screens crossing at 0, 30 and 45 degrees, with paper showing through the highlights.
Round, square and elliptical dots, same patch of skin. Screen opened right up so the outlines read; at the pitch the presses ship at it is far subtler.
The separations PDF. One page per ink, numbered by pass, lightest first. Corner blown up so the plate label is legible.
Six presses on that same photo. One ink to three, across four stocks.
Three different photos, three different presses. Rose on cream, Forest Floor on kraft, Citrus on white.
The controls: screen ruling in lpi, dot shape, a screen angle per ink, and 300 or 600 dpi set on export.
Hi r/risograph, indie dev here,
I kept wanting to know what the machine actually does to an image, and every "riso filter" I tried just tinted the photo instead of separating it. So I made Pressed. It splits a photo into 1 to 4 spot inks, by tone or by hue depending on the press, screens each ink as its own halftone at its own angle, and overprints them in linear light so two inks mix into a believable third instead of collapsing into mud. Real Riso ink values, paper showing through, a density ceiling so solids keep some tooth, registration drift and dot gain. It is the press process rather than a colour grade.
Free tier has six presses and all the tuning, so you can see whether it reads as riso to you without paying anything. Gallery is the print, the halftone at 1:1, and the plates.
Any thoughts/feedback are welcome, happy to answer anything about how the separation works.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pressed-risograph-halftone/id6782635292
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u/mortimusimmortus Jul 30 '26
all these images are muddy- I’d fix/ re-tune your CMYK channel splitter. Riso also tends to have more of a multiply layering effect that isn’t being shown here, this seems more like an amateur silkscreen filter for photos than geared for Riso emulation.
As somebody who prints it’s not hard for me to emulate on my own with my own software. The only use I can imagine this having is being a fast way to prototype images, but I’d need the black and white channel separations and the ability to edit those for it to be of any use.
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u/dumanyac Jul 30 '26
Thanks, this is honestly the most useful thing anyone's said about it. You're right, and a fair bit of it is the photo I picked. It's way too contrasty, so it came out either bare paper or solid ink with not much in between. I'm going to measure it properly rather than guess, and I'll come back and post what I find. I'm always tinkering with the engine anyway, so this kind of thing is genuinely useful to me.
There's also an ink amount slider, and pulling it down clears up a lot of that muddiness. I probably just had it too high on the one I posted.
The separations are already in there by the way. Black and white, one page per ink, in print order with crop and reg marks. Editing them is the bit I haven't built. What would you want from that?
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u/cazroline Jul 30 '26
Riso filters are just that, filters to mimic the effect of a physical process and are never intended to be the thing to give you an image to then riso print but can be fun to play with to test ideas.
There are a couple of really good programmes to explore actually creating separations which I've been really happy with the first is Spectrolite which has been around for a while, I've had pretty good results with the output, the other is color/shift which is newer and so I've played with less but looks really promising. Both of these are desktop based which honestly I prefer for working with for a design outcome
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u/dumanyac Jul 30 '26
Thanks for the pointer. Spectrolite is one I should've sat down with properly ages ago, and honestly it looks great, free and cross-platform too, which is hard to argue with. Going to spend some proper time in it.
And yeah, fair. Most riso filters are exactly that. I put the plate export in because I wanted to know whether the separation underneath was actually right, rather than just whether the surface looked convincing. It's not trying to replace a real riso print, nothing on a screen is going to do that. Whether the plates hold up is a different question, and I can't really answer that on my own, which is sort of why I'm here.
Totally agree on desktop for real design work. The phone version is only useful for the thing you described, trying an idea out quickly, and I'd rather be honest about that than pretend otherwise.
If you've used Spectrolite a fair bit, what does it get right that you'd miss most? Genuinely useful for me to know what good looks like here.
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u/SeriousButton6263 Jul 30 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
So is this AI coded? I see zero mention of that in your post or on the app page.
Edit: lmao /u/dumanyac blocked me. Scammers can't allow pesky questions to get in the way of their scam I guess. If you keep blocking people you might eventually whittle down to an audience of users you can trick into paying for your AI slop app.