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Two or three real Riso inks, overprint blending, registration drift and paper stock, plus print-ready separations. In your browser.
Inks — choose how many drums you’re simulating. Two is the classic riso setup and where most of the character comes from; three adds range but compounds registration drift, exactly as it would on a real machine. Pick from the named ink library rather than a colour picker — more on why below.
Separation mode decides how your full-colour image becomes two or three inks, and it’s the control that most affects whether the result looks considered or muddy.
Per-ink tone curve — black point, white point and gamma for each ink. A good riso separation is mostly tonal adjustment, so expect to spend your time here rather than anywhere else.
Overprint is on by default and should usually stay on. Riso inks are semi-transparent, so where two overlap you get a genuine third colour rather than one hiding the other. Turning it off gives you knockout, which is occasionally right for flat graphics and almost never right for photographs.
Halftone runs once per ink. LPI around 70–85 matches real Riso output — much finer and you lose the visible screen that makes it read as riso. Angle is offset per ink by default to avoid moiré; break it deliberately if you want the interference. Screen type switches between halftone dots and error diffusion — real machines do both, and diffusion gives a grainier, more photographic result.
Registration is where the authenticity lives. Offset shifts each ink by the equivalent of a millimetre or two — subtle, not the wild displacement of a glitch. Rotation drift tilts each layer by up to a degree, because a sheet re-entering the machine for its second pass never sits at exactly the same angle. That rotation is the detail almost every riso filter misses, and it’s most of what separates convincing from approximate.
Paper — set the stock colour and texture. Riso is very often printed on coloured or off-white paper, and this single control changes the result more than any other. Show-through adds a faint ghost of the image from the reverse of the sheet.
Ink behaviour — dot gain spreads each ink into the paper, mottling varies density across solid areas, and roller marks add faint streaking in the feed direction. Riso solids are never perfectly flat; flat solids are the fastest tell that something is simulated.
That matters for two reasons. If you’re printing for real, you can only use inks a studio actually stocks — so picking a colour that doesn’t exist means redoing the whole separation. And if you’re not printing, those specific colours are why riso looks like riso. Fluorescent Pink in particular has no equivalent in CMYK; it’s outside the gamut, which is exactly why it reads as printed rather than rendered.
Fluorescent Pink and Federal Blue is the canonical pairing and the default here. It’s the combination on most of the riso work you’ve seen.
Custom colours are available, but the library is the point.
A Risograph prints one colour per pass, so a real job needs one greyscale file per drum. Every designer preparing riso currently does that separation by hand — duplicating layers, converting to greyscale, adjusting each channel, exporting individually, hoping the tonal balance holds.
Here it’s a single export: one correctly named greyscale file per ink, plus the composite showing what they’ll look like combined. Take the separations to your printer and the preview to your client.
That’s the difference between a filter and a tool a print studio would use.
Do it once per ink colour and you have a set. Note the seed and you can regenerate the same texture at a different size later, which a downloaded overlay pack can never do.
For ready-made versions, our texture packs include riso, halftone and print-degradation sets.
Illustrator can’t do it at all in any useful sense — there’s no semi-transparent overprint model that behaves like real ink.
Here it’s live. Change the ink and watch the whole separation reflow. Nothing to install, works on desktop, tablet or phone, exports PNG and separations.
Every characteristic of the aesthetic follows from that mechanism.
Registration drift happens because the second pass is mechanical and the sheet never re-enters at exactly the same position or angle. Overprinting produces genuine third colours because the inks are semi-transparent rather than opaque. Mottling and dot gain come from uncoated, absorbent paper. Coarse screens — around 70–85 lines per inch against offset’s 150–300 — leave the halftone visible. And the inks smudge, because soy ink never fully cures.
Riso machines were built in the 1980s for cheap high-volume office duplication — church newsletters, school handouts. They were adopted by artists and small publishers decades later precisely because they’re imprecise, at the point when everything else had become perfectly repeatable. The appeal isn’t nostalgia. It’s that every copy is measurably slightly different from the last, which is a quality digital printing spent forty years eliminating.
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Yes. Alongside the composite image you can export one greyscale file per ink, correctly named and ready to send to a print studio. A Risograph prints one colour per pass, so a real job needs exactly that — and it is normally done by hand in Photoshop.
Fluorescent Pink and Federal Blue is the canonical pairing and the default here. Fluorescent Pink sits outside the CMYK gamut, which is a large part of why riso reads as printed rather than rendered. If you are printing for real, check which inks your studio actually stocks before you separate.
Riso inks are semi-transparent, so where two overlap they mix into a genuine third colour rather than one covering the other. Overprint reproduces that. Turning it off gives you knockout, which suits some flat graphics but almost never suits photographs.
A Risograph prints one colour per pass, so the sheet goes through the machine once for each ink. It never re-enters at exactly the same position or angle, so each colour lands slightly offset and very slightly rotated. That rotation is the detail most riso filters miss, and it is what separates a convincing result from an approximate one.
Raise Mottling. Real riso solids vary in density because ink transfer through the stencil is uneven, so a perfectly flat area is the fastest sign that something is simulated. Adding a little dot gain and roller marks helps for the same reason.
Two is the classic riso setup and where most of the character comes from. Three adds tonal range but compounds registration drift, exactly as it would on a real machine, and each extra pass costs money and time in a real print run.
No. Riso and Risograph are trademarks of Riso Kagaku Corporation, who make the duplicators this effect is named after. This is an independent design tool that simulates the look, and the ink names are used as colour references only.
Yes. Every export on a paid plan carries a full commercial licence, with no watermarks and no per-use fees.
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