Love the risograph print look? Learn what makes riso prints special, how ink separation and misregistration work, and how to create a realistic riso effect digitally or prepare files for a real riso printer.
Risograph prints have a look you can spot across a room. Bright, slightly off-register colours. Grainy textures. Inks that overlap into new colours. It's become the signature style of zines, indie posters and art book fairs.
The catch: not everyone has a riso printer down the street. Here's how to get that look digitally, and how to prepare files if you do get access to one.
A risograph is a stencil duplicator made by the Japanese company Riso Kagaku, introduced in the 1980s. It works a bit like screen printing:
It was made for cheap high-volume copying in schools and offices. Artists adopted it because the results are beautiful in an imperfect way.
Riso inks are specific pigments, not CMYK mixes. Fluorescent pink, teal, sunflower yellow and federal blue are favourites.
The inks are semi-transparent, so pink over blue gives a purple. Two or three inks can make a surprising range of colours.
Each pass lands slightly differently, so layers shift by a millimetre or two. That small offset is a big part of the charm.
Tones are made with a halftone or grain pattern, and ink coverage is uneven. Solid areas often show slight speckling.
In Bitgrain:
If you're printing at a riso studio, they'll want one greyscale file per ink. Black in the file means full ink; white means no ink.
Bitgrain exports exactly that: a ZIP with one PNG layer per ink. Hand it to the studio and tell them which ink goes on which file.
A few tips from riso studios:
Start with two inks. It's easier to control and still gives you three colours.
The riso look is about limits: few inks, imperfect alignment, visible texture. Those limits are what make it feel human.
You don't need the machine to start. Open Bitgrain, pick two inks and see what your photo becomes. If you love it, the per-ink export is ready for a real riso run.