Have you tried emailing James Wignall the author?

I think you should redo the steps and make sure you have them exact.

No, not yet. I wanted to be sure I didn't miss anything very obvious.

I'm fairly certain I did everything correct up to that point. It is really the whole thing in Step 11 ... Don't you agree that the channel mixer isn't able to do separations as shown in the tutorial? My question is really more academical and not pressing ...

Udo, thanks for posting the link to that. I hadn't seen it. I'll have to work through it and see what I come up with. I have done some minor work in PS with the channels, which seems to really be the key to this tutorial. It would be nice to figure this out.

I'm looking forward to your results. Make sure to post here again

Gee, if creating off-register, fuzzy, and muddied looking prints were only so easy before the digital era, eh?

The step I think you just might have tripped on would be to make sure that for each 'faux channel' layer you adjust with a Channel Mixer adjustment, you have to be sure that it's zeroes for three channels, 100 for the target channel. The way it reads it says 'respective' channel, but I can see somebody simply creating four Cyan faux-channels if they missed that.

Another, lengthier way to do this is to create 4 Solid Colour adjustment layers of 100 of each of C, M, Y, and K (all set to Mulitply) and copy the channel data from a copy of the original image as gresycale back into these Solid Colour layers MASKS (use the Ctrl-number channel view shortcut to quickly get to the channel greyscale image, select-all, copy, then Alt-click on solid colour mask to access it's greyscale to paste into). You'll need to add a bottom 'white' layer unless you have the transparency checkerboard set to 'none' in prefs.

There's a bit of an advantage -- from there you can just tweak the actual 'mix' of each of the CMYK inks by dbl clicking on the colour swatch to add a little black, (gee, that yellow looks too clean to be 'retro') or whatever. And of course, being an adjustment LAYER vs an image adjustment, it's redo-able.

For the record, I once tried doing this with stacked Channel Mixing layers set to multiply -- but for whatever reason, that doesn't work.

I just select everything one channel and shift it a few microns

Hehehe.

No, that wasn't the issue. I simply get nothing not even a cyan layer when I follow step 11 If you look closely at the pictures in the tutorial (resolution is high enough for that) you'll see that he creates "layers" as faux channels, then making them into cyan, magenta, etc. ... And the way he describes it (Quote: "using the Channel Mixer (Image>Adjustments> Channel Mixer)") he doesn't even use adjustment layers.

This is actually an interesting aspect. But I'm happy with my way of doing it. To me the question is really more academic.

How do you shift a selection from a channel without copying it somewhere else?

Yep. I followed that. What he's doing is essentially making four copies as layers of the original layers. Then he uses a Image/Adjustment/Channel Mixer move (the non-layer kind) on each of these layer images of setting the other three channels to zero (white) and then repeating this for each other layer. Setting all these layers to multiply removes the white and blends them... back to the original image. Only, in layer form.

There's a third hybrid to keep the Channel Mixing 'tweakable'. Replace the permanent Channel Mixing move on each copy layer with a separate Channel Mixer adjustment layer for each copy layer, and Alt-clk (link) that adjustment layer to the image copy layer below it. Set the image copy to multiply. You could then even group each Channel Mixer with it's underlying image (using New group from selected layers).

By keeping the full image accessible in each layer group, you're opening up more possibilities and discoveries... on your path to emulating the dirty truth of the analog age.

Got it now. I was obviously just to stupid to use the channel mixer. Please, never again answer this thread, so it may get buried deep inside the forum and people will hopefully one day forget how dense I am

Now, this is a really good tip. So it wasn't all for nothing

Hey, it wasn't stupid at all... just a little cognitive glitch.

And besides, I actually enjoyed thinking about what was trying to be accomplished here, and it made me think that this approach (well, at least the modified one I came up with) could be a lot of fun to tinker with. So, thanks! It was a very interesting exercise.

And any more 'stupid' questions, just fire away!

well your confusion created with that tut & for that you're incomplete designed so for that try to put your creativity in it & try to get new things from that.

If anyone is interested, I posted the result on behance.