A collection of writings, guides, templates, and other miscellaneous offerings from TXTbooks.
Spectrolite
Spectrolite is a free application designed to simplify the color separation process for Risograph Printing. It was developed by Anemone studio. Download the app and input the TXTbooks color swatch to access our color selection and begin exploring options for your art. This app is a great place to start, but we encourage tweaking levels in photoshop to ensure proper balances between lights and darks.
2023 Color Swatch for Spectrolite
A .zip of our Riso colors for use in Spectrolite.
Riso Color Swatch Chips
A dropbox link to our Riso Swatch chips. Download these so you can see roughly how each color prints.
File Prep Checklist
A nice walk-through with considerations for preparing your riso file to send for printing. We recommend you use this if you plan to print with us.
Swatch and Mode Tests Full PDF
A full PDF documentation from our old "Swatch and Mode Tests" book, which is now out-of-print. Instead of dedicating time and effort to reprinting this, we used this as a basis to create a more robust web-based walkthrough and more bare-bones color swatch cards to showcase the colors.
2020 Riso Colors for Adobe Apps (.ASE)
An Adobe-Ready Swatch File plus an image reference of colors currently available in our studio. The values contained within are for planning purposes only and are "on-screen" approximations in a hybrid RGB/LAB color space. Includes a ReadMe file. Please note that our current color load out may be different than those featured here.
Riso Color Guide, 2005
The attached is a 300DPI Scan of the Official Riso Standard and Special Edition Color Guide, Published in 2005.
This particular copy of this promotional/sales publication was packaged with our Riso MZ790 which was purchased during a public auction from a school district in Colorado. The book features annotations throughout from their print technician / district manager noting colors they wanted to purchase. The publication itself was printed Riso and is one-sided in nature. Being that it's from 2005, it's a bit outdated in its S-Numbers and lacking in its current color range.
I'm scanning this as further documentation and reference against the RGB color swatches, which I personally don't like as a reference and think confuse people. Obviously this is still scanned so doesn't capture the full physical quality of the inks, but maybe it's helpful somehow.
This document was scanned on an Epson 10000XL and collected into a PDF with Adobe Acrobat. It has not been color corrected so all the swatches stay relative to each other in the scanner gamut range.
Color Separation 101
Duotone Channel Batching
A how-to-handout from our introductory Riso printing workshop at TXTbooks HQ. Includes an outline and step-by-step process for separating an image using color data held in CMYK channels and batching them to approximate your riso colors.
Color Separation 101
Select Color Range to Spot Color
A how-to-handout from our introductory Riso printing workshop at TXTbooks HQ. Includes an outline and step-by-step process for separating an image using the select color range function in photoshop.
Notes on Self-Publishing w/ Riso
Handout from a class at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop covering the basics of Riso production and artist books. Features a set of questions one can ask themselves while working on self-produced publications.
