Spectrolite – Mac app to make colorful risograph prints and zines more easily | Hacker News Reader

Spectrolite – Mac app to make colorful risograph prints and zines more easily

spectrolite.app

166 pointsmtg28 comments

TIL what the risograph process is: https://web.faa.illinois.edu/app/uploads/sites/6/2021/05/ris...

It’s by far one of my favorite machines, even though I’ve never used one (and am far from a print designer). I just really love that it’s basically the traditional screen printing process, but automated.

Risographs are hard to find (in working order).

I briefly experimented with trying to load my own colored toner in an old laser printer cartridge and got nowhere.

I honestly don't remember what the failure was — may have been that the printer I was using didn't have an easy-to-access cartridge where I could just dump in new toner. Or it's possible it was a B&W laser printer and either the fuser didn't cook off the toner or somehow the toner was not statically clinging correctly to the paper.

Anyone know of any experiments like this to create your own poor-man's Risograph with a used laser printer?

I was trying to use a B&W laser printer because I knew there would be no mediation by the driver to determine "which cartridge to use". I suppose I could try to swap toner cartridges in a color printer and somehow convince the printer driver to only use the K cartridge (where perhaps I have loaded green toner — a mix of course of yellow and cyan toner that I will have prepared ahead of time).

> Risographs are hard to find (in working order).

I see that the company has a website that sells brand-new machines. Are they not suitable for this kind of printing?

Or do you mean that it is hard to find a "service" with a working machine?

TIL, they still make these printers!

Due to the price though I'm still looking for a boneheaded hack using a cheap used laser printer with user-supplied custom toner.

For anyone interested in the process there are a bunch of places that do Risograph printing. People make all sorts of creative things with the machines.

https://www.pushpullseattle.com/risograph.html

https://www.odditiesprints.com/risograph

https://www.paperpresspunch.com/riso-printing

This is fantastic! Thank you for making it and sharing your work. I also just learned about the risograph process.

Thank you for sharing this. I had no idea what the risograph process is. Amazing to learn about this.

Super cool. I played with it for 10 minutes now.

It really wants a portrait-aspect-ratio artwork though. The first file I tried was more like "Cinemascope" and the UI was a little tight.

Maybe I need to play more, but I feel like part of the Risograph charm is that the inks you use may not match exactly how the original was separated. I would like to select inks for separation but then a different palette for composition (and a handy preview of what that might look like).

Given that this is an Electron app, why only release for macOS?

The devs may not have linux or windows machines to build on

And they don't need to – Electron tooling can cross-compile just fine nowadays. Of course, to test it you do have to have access to the platform, but even an untested release would be nice.

(That said, I'd probably release it as a webapp instead – unless there's some native code involved, and even that probably could be compiled as Wasm.)

Edit: looked into it, seems they are using a Go executable as the core of the app, which means a naive port (drop app.asar into Electron package for another platform) isn't an option here but it still should be pretty easy to port.

If you're on Windows or Linux yourself, why not contact them and ask / offer to be a tester? It might be as simple as they haven't gotten around to it, they don't have demand, or they don't have a device to test it themselves.

I'd love to beta-test this on Linux but I'm afraid I won't last for long – I'm just not in the target audience for risograph printing software. I could help setting up a test suite that can then be be run across all platforms, though.

And it seems like they are reluctant to support other platforms:

> Currently there is no active plan to make a Windows version. We'll post here if that changes. (https://spectrolite.app/how-to/using-spectrolite/download#wi...)

To answer hypotheses from others:

> Will there be a Windows version?

> Currently there is no active plan to make a Windows version. We'll post here if that changes.

https://spectrolite.app/how-to/using-spectrolite/download

This looks useful. The real fun of the risograph is experimenting with the many inks to get that vibrant, expressive riso look rather than something natural like you might go for with traditional CMYK printing. This might make that experimentation a little faster.

Big fan of riso so I welcome the initiative! Not on Mac tho so I'll keep using 'photoshop' for mockups, and hoping this will be adopted well enough to warrant a win version down the line.

To get a sense of how gorgeous Riso prints are, check this out: https://youtu.be/1rfwKuXIhcE?si=oQdBpkCFUs7aSaCH

I'd love to, but 98% of this video is a close-up shot of a woman talking for 13 minutes and maybe 5 seconds showing a mostly blue drawing.

Is this link broken for anyone else?

Yep, broken here

After doing a bit of dig-ing (haha) it seems like quad9 sees the site as malicious... Sent a false positive report to them and the upstream info provider.

FYI the images are very low resolution, which is a shame for a graphical application.

Looks like image srcset is set to max out at 800 px. On my screen that's stretched to nearly 2000px which makes it very blurry!

Usecase is for printing on paper en masse for zines and posters, resolution doesn't really matter much here

You’re not going to go very far with a 800px poster… Maybe a fridge magnet.

Sure, but these are pictures of a Mac application. Resolution does matter when looking at screenshots of a program's UI.

Sorry I wasn’t clear. I’m referring to images on the webpage (i.e. screenshots).

Yep, first thing I noticed too!

For a graphical print application, the quality of the screenshots leads me to make conclusions on the quality of the application's graphics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com