What Are The Steps Needed 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. In t-shirt printing, ‘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.

A graphic design professional typically determines the exact Pantone colours that the ink will be matched to in order to produce a high fidelity image. Pantone coated or noncoated color types are selected to clarify the ink hues of the pattern. Used in publishing, printing and design whereby each colour is identified by a unique pantone name and number, the Pantone matching system is an international colour reference.

When colour identity and uniformity is an issue, for example in branded promotional garments or a large selection of products, this method of spot color printing works very well.

The Four Color Process is another method used in tshirt screen printing. This printing process is utilised primarily with photographic designs and sketches comprised of a broad variety of hues, shades and gradations. Hard covers, paperbacks and periodicals all use the same four-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. This is rather more difficult process to achieve on a fabric than it is on paper. However the method employed is essentially the same.

This method of tshirt printing is only useful for white garments, and will not work well on 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 t-shirt printers reproduce such full colour images onto coloured fabrics a method called ‘Simulated Process’ is used. Much like spot colour printing, the art is divided into tones and colours to preserve the essential qualities of the original.

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. This is the most expensive form of printing and as such used only on larger print runs due to the higher set up costs involving the colour separations and larger number of colours used to print the images.

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