Spatial frequency separability is proposed as an attractive exploit for obtaining color halftone watermarking methods from monochrome clustered-dot halftone watermarking techniques. Detection of watermarks embedded in individual halftone channels is typically confounded by the cross-coupling between colorant halftone separations and scan RGB channels caused by the so-called “unwanted absorptions”. This problem is resolved in the proposed framework by utilizing spatial filtering in order to obtain estimates of individual separation halftones that are suitable for watermark detection. The effectiveness of this methodology is experimentally demonstrated by utilizing continuous phase modulation for per-separation watermark embedding. The embedded watermark patterns in the halftone separations can be clearly detected from scans using the proposed spatial separability exploit. Continuous phase modulation based per-channel embedding with detection following spatial-filtering based separation thus provides an effective watermarking method for clustered-dot color halftones.