Just What Does T-Shirt Printing Entail?

For merchandise and fashion there are mainly 3 particular methods of screen printing employed. ‘Spot Color’ printing is the method most often used for a large variety of graphics. It is also the best suited method for such a task. 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. An international colour reference used in publishing, printing and design whereby each colour is identified by a unique Pantone name and number and is called the Pantone matching system.

Spot colour printing is well suited to printing branded promotional garments or items in which colour identity and uniformity needs to stay the same throughout a varying range of items.

The Four Color Process is another method used in tshirt screen printing. This is the best way to print photographs and illustrations which contain broad colour ranges, tones, and graduations. Book and magazine images are also printed by the same 4 colour process.

The inks are transparent and blend with one another on a white backdrop to recreate each of the colours and shades that the original possessed. It is a lot harder to process on 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 cost for the print set up is going to be a lot higher than that of simple spot colour designs and is only good for the bigger print runs of 100+. When the t-shirt printers make full coloured images and put them on coloured fabrics this is called ‘Simulated process’. The artwork is separated into various colours and shades using a method similar to spot colour printing to achieve the overall look and feel of the original image.

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 costs when it comes to setup, colour separations and the larger number of colours, this is considered the most expensive form of printing.