Color separation services charge per design. Your everyday jobs do not have to.

What separation services actually charge

These are published prices from named vendors, not estimates. ContractPrinter lists four tiers, checked 28 July 2026: $15 for one or two spot colours on clean artwork, $30 for three to five colours with moderate detail and trapping, $55 for six to eight colours on detailed artwork, and $85 and up for nine-plus colours or photorealistic simulated-process work — with revisions at $5 each. Victory Screen Factory, same date, lists a straight per-colour ladder: $18.99 for two colours, $28.99 for three, rising in ten-dollar steps to $78.99 for eight. Neither publishes a turnaround, so do not read one into their pricing; a day, sometimes two, is what the field quotes generally, with some vendors offering same-day or four-hour rush. That $85 tier is worth putting in context rather than treating as the going rate, because plenty of the field is flat-fee and lands below it: checked 29 July 2026, 24 Hour Seps — Scott Fresener's own service — lists a flat $65 per set for any number of colours (a promotional rate when checked; their volume packs go lower), Burn My Screen a flat $60 per design, and Color-Separation.com $15 to $50 with the underbase and highlight white included. So a hard photographic sim-process design realistically runs $50 to $85, and a simple two-colour job $15 to $19.

And what it looks like inside a shop's own pricing

Shops generally pass separation on inside the setup fee rather than billing it separately, which is why customer-facing guides quote setup per colour or per screen rather than per separation. Published figures we can source: around $20 to $50 a screen depending on complexity, with separation, film and burning bundled into that one line. One number in wide circulation deserves correcting, because we quoted it wrongly ourselves: the "$25 to $75 a colour" range that gets repeated comes from a source saying $25 per colour per screen — which is $25 for a one-colour job and $75 for a three-colour job, a flat rate multiplied out, not a range of per-colour prices. Published per-colour ranges are lower, around $15 to $30 a colour. The individual numbers are not shocking either way. The arithmetic over a year is what is: a shop running two or three separated jobs a week at $30 is spending $3,000 to $4,500 a year on separations, most of it on artwork that was never difficult.

When a human separator is genuinely worth the money

We are not going to pretend otherwise, because you will find out on press. A skilled separator working on a photograph for a dark garment is doing something no software in this category does reliably — reading which ink should carry a skin tone, deciding where a red channel hands off to magenta, judging how hot to run the highlight white for the inks and mesh *you* run, and knowing from experience which parts of the image will fall apart on a 50/50 blend. That is press judgement, not image maths. If your job is a nine-colour photorealistic print, if you are quoting a client who will reject anything less than perfect, or if you simply do not have the hours to sit with channels this week, $60 to $85 to a person who separates all day is a good trade — and at the flat-fee end of the field it is $60 to $65 regardless of how many colours the design needs, which is a genuinely reasonable price for expertise. It also buys accountability: somebody to send it back to. Our own simulated process ships with per-channel curve and density override precisely because fully automatic simulated process is unreliable in every tool on the market, ours included — a photograph does not contain a single correct answer that an algorithm can find. Anyone selling you a one-button sim-process is selling you a reprint.

The job list where per-design fees are pure overhead

Now look at what is actually in your queue. A two-colour band logo. Lettering for a school team in the school's two colours. A four-ink retro design on black. A flat illustration for a brewery. A reprint of last season's art with one colour swapped. Spot-colour work is most of the volume in most shops, and none of it needs a specialist: it needs every pixel of each ink grouped onto one plate, cleanly, in register, at full resolution. That is a solved problem, it runs on your own hardware in seconds, and it is free here with no account. The one thing to check is the thing cheap separators and cheap software both get wrong — a plate is defined by colour, not by shape. Cream lettering appearing in eleven letters plus two snowcaps is one screen, printed once, so it has to come out as one plate; tools that separate by connected region hand you thirteen, and tools that filter small regions by area quietly drop the lettering. That is the specific failure to look for when you evaluate anything, including us.

What changes when separation stops being a purchase

Two things, and the second is bigger than the first. The obvious one is cost. The real one is that a separation you can redo in seconds is a separation you will actually iterate on. When a sep costs $30 and a day, you accept the first version — and when a revision costs $5 and another turnaround cycle, you accept the second. When re-rendering is free you try 45 lpi against 55, you look at the choke value on your own garment colour, you drop the ink count from seven to five and see whether it still holds, and you separate the quote before you win the job instead of after. Shops that quote from a real separation quote more accurately, because the ink count stops being a guess. That is a workflow change, not a discount.

The numbers, side by side

Free, permanently, with no account: spot and index separation, ink count and tolerance, merging, renaming and reordering inks, per-plate preview, and unlimited per-ink PNG, ZIP and ORA export, plus one PSD export a day on a free account — either the layered PSD or the multichannel PSD carrying one real Photoshop spot channel per ink, both written in your browser. Paid: the print-ready render — halftone screening at non-moiré angles, a choked underbase, a separate highlight white, per-ink choke and spread, trapping, dot-gain compensation, registration marks, vector plates, CMYK, simulated process, and 1-bit film at 600 or 1200 dpi — at 10 credits per image with free re-renders of that image for 24 hours. Credits come with a monthly plan, or as a one-off pack whose credits never expire — see the pricing page for current prices in your currency. A print-ready render is 10 credits, so a month’s plan allowance covers a run of them for around the cost of one $15 basic sep from a service. Where the comparison gets closer: if you send out two designs a year, a service is obviously cheaper than any subscription, and you should keep sending them out. Use the free half here for everything else.

Artwork you are not supposed to email out

A reason to separate in-house that has nothing to do with money. Licensed properties, NDA'd designs, unreleased album art, anything a client made you sign for — emailing that to a third-party separator is a decision somebody should have made deliberately. Free spot and index separation here runs entirely inside your browser and makes no network call at all during separation. That is not a privacy promise you have to take on faith; open your browser's network tab and watch nothing happen. Both PSD exports are written locally too, so a spot-channel file for a design under NDA never touches a server either. The paid render does upload the image, because plate rendering at print resolution needs a server; that copy is deleted within 24 hours and is never used to train models.

What you are giving up

You are giving up a person who has separated ten thousand designs and knows what the emulsion in your shop does. You are giving up someone to blame and someone to send it back to. You are giving up the mesh-count and print-order recommendations that a service quietly includes with the files, and any accumulated library of press-tested settings for specific inks. And on genuinely hard simulated-process work you are taking on judgement calls you may not want. What you get back is the everyday jobs off the invoice, separations in seconds instead of a day, free iteration instead of a revision fee, artwork that never leaves the building, and no watermarks or downscaling on any output at any tier. If that trade works for the flat spot work and you keep paying a human for the photographs, that is not us losing — that is the correct answer.