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 Simulated-process handoff can use whole-channel density values from a retained local palette, but a direct render has no editable channels, and neither path has per-channel tone curves, an adjustable highlight threshold or a paid-render order override. 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. Much of that spot-colour work needs every appearance of each ink grouped into one mask, cleanly and in register at the current working-canvas size. The local engine does that on your hardware for free with no account, but it is not a universal press decision: it marks the largest colour field as the base, so inspect that choice, the source resolution and the raw edges before exporting. The other thing to check is what cheap separators and cheap software 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. Those are the specific failures 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 an in-house separation you can rerun without another vendor cycle is one 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. During the 24-hour free re-render window you can try 45 lpi against 55, inspect the choke value on your own garment colour, or re-run the free local separation after dropping the ink count from seven to five and then render that updated palette. 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 the local plate stack, and per-plate preview. Downloads need free sign-in; after that, per-ink PNG, ZIP and ORA export is unlimited, while layered and multichannel PSDs share one free export a day and cost 3 credits each afterwards for non-subscribers. Paid: the print-ready render — halftone screening at separated angles, a choked underbase, a separate highlight white, per-ink choke and spread, dot-gain compensation, registration marks, optional SVG tracing, CMYK, simulated process, and 1-bit film targeting 600 or 1200 dpi within disclosed output caps — at 10 credits per image with free re-renders of that image for 24 hours. Automatic trapping is not an exposed control. 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. 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 runs entirely inside your browser and uploads no artwork. The small anonymous outcome beacon carries only the run type, duration and resulting printable-screen count; download account checks also carry metadata, not image pixels. Both PSD writers are local too, so a spot-channel file for an NDA design does not send its artwork to a server. 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, an in-house path whose runtime you can measure on your own files, iteration inside the 24-hour free re-render window instead of a revision fee, artwork that never leaves the building on the free spot/index path, and no watermark or extra export-tier downscale. The working canvas can still be fitted to the current device before separation. 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.