Basic Design Tips - Digital art format - About Process Color - Color Theory -
Pantone Color Matching - Designing a hot selling tee - Producing art for silkscreen

About Process Color

If your order is fewer than 12 shirts, your design can use any number of colors, even photographs. This is because we have a state of the art direct to garment printing technology that delivers permanant high quality prints comparable to silkscreen, that we use for smaller orders.

Most people are thrilled with the product we deliver. But our printer uses process color, special garment inks of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black printed to simulate a broader range of color. Process color is a compromise however, it can produce a limited range of color. We want you to understand this color model to better understand what we offer.
This is the original image, created in RGB (red, green, blue), this is the color mode native to computer monitors, the color mode of light itself. It represents a very broad range of color including very bright and intense colors.
This is the same image, after being converted to CMYK (cyan,yellow,magenta,black) color mode. No color can be brighter than any of the original individual CMYK colors, so the color range of this model is limited. Notice how the blues in particular have less brightness compared to the original.

We hire the best graphic and production specialists to color optimize your art to produce the best possible process color print, and this service is free. We simply want you to understand the limitations of process color so there is no misunderstanding.

If you want to create your art within the limitations of cmyk to have more consistancy between what you create and the print, read on. Understand that this is a capability of professional software.
In Photoshop, under the view menu, is the Gamut Warning option. 'Gamut" refers to the color range, if a color cannot be reproduced in process color it is 'out of gamut'. When applied, the warning will preview any color that cannot be printed in process color, a dull gray.
Here's an example, the red color chosen is too bright to print in process color, the gamut warning therefore previews the color, not as red, but as a dull gray to alert you to the problem.
If you double click the color, you'll get the color picker. Look at where the arrow is pointing. That triangle with the exclamation point is alerting you that the color chosen is out of gamut for CMYK, the small square of color underneath is a close color to what you have selected that is in gamut for CMYK and can be reproduced in process printing. Look also at the RGB values and the CMYK values on the bottom right.
Clicking on the 'reccomended' color beneath the triangle give us this, a red color that can be reproduced in process color. Note the RGB values now, much changed. The CMYK numbers however are unchanged.
With the process color friendly red color, the brush previews the red with the gamut warning turned on.

Of course, with Photoshop, you can work directly in CMYK mode (some filters may not work, and the file size is larger [4 channels of color instead of the fewer 3]). This may be the best way to work with photos. Understand that CMYK format is incompatable with all web formats - you must return to RGB mode before saving as Gif, Jpg or Png. For high res master art, we reccomend .tiff, .eps or (for the best quality and web compatability) png24 formats.

With both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator you have access to digital Pantone commercial color swatches, including process color swatches. Selecting colors from a process color swatch library can be very helpful in creating art ready for process printing.

Pantone books of printed color samples are not cheap, but can be worth the expense as they can help you calibrate your monitor and printer with pieces of precisely printed color to match and compare to. More information about Pantone here.