electrosaur

I'm building Reveal, an open-source color separation engine for screen printing. It takes a full-color image and reduces it to 3-10 spot colors. This is not for CMYK 4-color process or simulated process ('halftones' using opaque colors).

The core is pure JavaScript with zero dependencies. It works in Lab color space (not RGB) using Wu quantization, CIE perceptual distance metrics, and a DNA fingerprinting system that matches each image to one of 20+ built-in archetypes (Golden Hour, Dark Portrait, Fine Art Scan, etc.).

There's a browser-based web UI that just needs Node.js — drop an image, get 4 different possible separations side by side, export as layered OpenRaster (for GIMP/Krita), or flat PNG, or layered PSD (for Photoshop). There's also a CLI and Photoshop plugin.

Apache 2.0: https://github.com/electrosaur-labs/reveal

Some of my screen prints: https://www.electrosaur.org

I'm building a color separation engine for screen printing that operates entirely in CIELab — Photoshop is hardwired for it, so while OKLab is mathematically superior for hue linearity, the constant translation overhead isn't worth it when you're doing surgery on 16-bit photography into discrete spot-color plates.

The real proof of moving away from Euclidean RGB distances isn't in the composite — it's in the separated plates. Look at the individual channels of a complex texture like weathered terracotta through a Lab-aware engine, and the structural integrity of the gradients is night and day compared to legacy indexing. Even 1976-era Lab is a massive leap from RGB heuristics.