Color Separation Techniques In T-Shirt Printing

[Marie Ponsaran]

T-shirt screen printing using traditional means often produce simple designs composed of as many as three to four colors only. However, technological advancements in t-shirt printing and new formulations of textile inks have brought color separation techniques to higher levels of sophistication. Today, there are, at least, five color separation techniques.

Simple Spot T-Shirt Printing

The simple spot printing is the most commonly used technique. It needs one screen for each color and the application of ink follows the size of coverage for each color. This is good for simple designs that require no halftone coloring, such as cartoons, line art, or vector art.

Dark fabrics printed using simple spot t-shirt printing will need either discharging or underprinting. Discharging is the process of reducing or removing the fabric’s color through bleaching for the textile ink to remain vibrant when applied.

Underprinting, on the other hand, is the technique screen printers use to maintain the opacity of the top layer of colors. They apply an under layer of light color and have it dried through flashing. The shirts are exposed to high heat from in-line infrared or quartz heating units.

Complex Spot T-Shirt Printing

Some designs in t-shirt printing require more colors than the available hues of textile inks. Halftones and secondary colors are produced by mixing one layer of color with another (halftone) or integrating the original color of the fabric with the ink to produce new shades of color.

This process needs a deeper understanding of the color separation process and intuitive skills in matching colors and applying the ink on specified areas of the design. To produce the complexity of the design, t-shirt printing companies now use modified inkjet printers for direct-to-garment t-shirt printing or digital screen printing.

Photographic Spot T-Shirt Printing

Direct-to-garment t-shirt printing is the one technique t-shirt printers use when they need to produce photographic designs. Images made from photographs or graphic designs using complex color separations surely require the help of technology. Direct-to-garment inkjet t-shirt printing is the best option for these types of t-shirt designs.

Duotone And Tritone T-Shirt Printing

Duotones and tritones are often seen in sepia or black and white photographs. The effect can be achieved through the skillful use of white ink, or through the discharging method, which often produces earth-tone colors in fabric.

Four-Color Process T-Shirt Printing

Four-color process t-shirt printing, or CMYK color separation, is the one that has been in development for many years. CMYK stands for Cyan (Blue), Magenta (Red), Yellow, and Black, which are the only colors used to produce different shades and hues.

T-shirt printing experts are continuously improving on the technique to produce the desired results, although many factors affect the outcome of the t-shirt printing process. One of these factors is the thickness and type of fabric, which affect the ink coverage and image resolution. There is also the question of how much pressure should be applied to saturate the weave of the fabric.

Many t-shirt printing companies have proprietary techniques in producing photo-realistic images on fabric without resorting to digital printing. The process is labor intensive and time consuming, which makes it expensive to implement.

These are just five of the many techniques available for t-shirt printing companies to use. Some printers use a combination of techniques to match the t-shirt design with the original artwork.

In fact, what determines the quality of the t-shirt printing output is the original artwork’s quality. It should be in clear JPG format and a soft copy in Adobe Photoshop should be given to the screen printers of the t-shirt printing company you have ordered t-shirts from.