How Is The Process Done For T-Shirt Printing?
For t-shirt printing and other promotional garments and merchandise, screen printing is often employed using one of three different methods. ‘Spot Colour’ printing is widely used and works well with many types of graphics. Spot colour printing is best used when printing graphics which are usually not very photographic in nature.
A graphic designer usually chooses the ink colours used to reproduce the graphic images, and they are all Pantone specified. Pantone coated or uncoated colour references are chosen to specify the ink colours of the design. Used in publishing, printing and design, the Pantone matching system, is internationally used to identify colors with a unique name and number.
This method of spot colour printing is particularly suited to the printing of branded promotional garments or merchandise where colour identity and uniformity must remain constant throughout a diverse range of products.
4 Color Process is an additional technique for t-shirt screen printing. This is the best way to print photographs and illustrations which contain broad colour ranges, tones, and graduations. All magazines and books use this four-color printing process as well.
The inks, though they are translucent, will merge together on the white background, which will reproduce the tones and hues of the original. This is rather more difficult process to achieve on a fabric than it is on paper. The methods are pretty similar. This t-shirt printing method only works well on white garments and is unsuitable for coloured fabrics. The print set up costs are higher than that of simple spot colour designs and as such only suitable for larger print runs of 100+
When garment screen printers reproduce such full colour images onto coloured fabrics a method called ‘Simulated Process’ is used. The artwork is divided into different hues and tones utilising a process that resembles spot colour printing in order to obtain the overall appearance and style of the original picture.
For transferring heavy metal imagery and fantasy imagery from CD covers to black T-shirts for band merchandise, this popular method is used by printers everywhere. Due to the higher set up prices which includes the separating of the colour as well as an increased amount of colours used to print the pictures, this works out to be the most expensive way of printing.
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