Another CMYK separation in 3D

By putting each channel on a 3D plane with a slight depth offset and set the planes to blend using the “multiply” blendMode, you’ll get an impression of how CMYK separations are done for printed media. While not technically correct, it works much in the same way. Just move the camera a little to see the blur effect that happens in newspapers when the colors miss.

I did this experiment as an example for an upcoming Away3D tutorial I’m writing for Flashmagazine. Rather than using the Munch image, I wanted an image where you could clearly see the difference in the C, M, Y, K color channels, so here I’ve used a color wheel that Adobe’s John Nack published of the CS3 icons.

Click and drag to see the CMYK color layers. I’ll publish the source files for this one when the tutorial is done. Click here for a much larger version.

I used a slightly different approach for creating the color channel PNGs this time and I think this became even more alike the original this time. I Google’d a lot to figure out how to do a proper separation of the channels to PNGs with transparency, but I’m sure there must be a better and easier way than what I did. If you know how to produce PNG files holding only the color information, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try it out.