What Are The Steps Needed For a T-shirt Printer?

For merchandise and fashion there are mainly 3 particular methods of screen printing employed. For any t-shirt printer, 'Spot Colour' printing is the most common and works exceptionally well for a great variety of graphics. Spot color printing is used for those graphics that do not have photographic properties.

The colored ink that is used in reproducing graphic images are chosen by a graphic designer and more often than not are Pantone specified colors. 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.

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.

"4 Colour Process" is another method of screen printing. This method of printing is used mainly for photographic images and illustrations that consist of a wide range of colours, tones and graduations. 4 colour process is also the same method of printing by which all images in books and magazines are printed.

These inks allow light to flow through and then merge together on white backgrounds to make all the hues and tones of the orginal one. It is much harder to do the same on cloth rather than than paper. But the method that is utilised is virtually identical. This 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+.

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 garment screen printers make full coloured images and put them on coloured fabrics this is called 'Simulated process'. Using method similar to spot colour, as used by a t-shirt printer to achieve the overall look and feel of the original image the artwork is separated into various colours and shades.

Most t-shirt printers use this method, and it is especially popular when used to copy fantasy and heavy metal album artwork onto shirts to be sold by the band. This, for a t-shirt printer is the most expensive. For that reason, it is used entirely on large print runs. This is because it costs more to set up the colour separations, and it takes a greater number of colours to print the pictures.