ImagesMagUK-Sep18

Quick artwork fixes for DTG printing TIPS & TECHNIQUES www.images-magazine.com 54 images SEPTEMBER 2018 reproduced exactly using the CMYK inks. This is where your RIP comes in, as a good one will help compensate for these out of gamut colours to produce a better print. All DTG machines are powered by software called a RIP (raster image processor). A good software RIP has colour profiling for the specific machine and inks, and has ICC profiles included. (Figure 1 shows the Garment Creator RIP that comes with the Epson F2000 printer.) Even a great RIP, however, won’t help with low quality artwork or artwork designed for a white background that needs to go on a black shirt. The limitations of CMYK inks also means that DTG prints can appear less vibrant – especially on spot colours – compared with a typical screen print. For example, if you lay down a bright scarlet screen print on a white shirt and then do the same job with DTG, the red on the DTG print is likely to T here are lots of articles about how to fix artwork for DTG printing, and many of them go into painful detail about all the things you need to do to make your designs print-ready. However, the reality is that you need to be disciplined about how much time you spend on adjusting the artwork for one shirt or even a few dozen shirts – the tweaks and fixes must be fast and easy to do if you’re to make a good profit. Here are some pointers... The limitations of CMYK inks DTG machines print using the standard four- colour ink set – cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). However, many image files are saved in RGB mode. The RGB colour space is much larger than CMYK – it holds more information – so when you convert a file from RGB to CMYK some colours are likely to go ‘out of gamut’ – ie, they can’t be Scott Fresener of T-Biz Network International shares some tips and advice on how to adjust your artwork to optimise your DTG prints appear less vibrant. That’s because the DTG print uses yellow and magenta ink to make red, whereas the screen print uses a single ink with pure red pigment. That is a huge difference [see Figure 2]. Where a DTG printer really shines, however, is in printing detailed, full-colour images: it loves pictures and images with a lot of hues and gradations. However, even the best printer using the best RIP will struggle if the original image is not sharp, clean, vibrant and well saturated, which brings us back to our Photoshop fixes. In the next section I’ll outline things you can do using Adobe Photoshop to improve your images (and these same techniques can be applied to Corel Photo Paint and other graphic programs). Image manipulation Adjust image resolution You will often get low resolution, 72dpi images that originate Figure 2: Note how the screen print [left] looks more vibrant than the DTG print Figure 1: Epson‘s Garment Creator RIP Figure 4: Remove artefacts and blocks with the Reduce Noise filter Figure 3: Make sure the image is set to 200-300dpi