There are three main methods to produce screen printed shirts for the fashion conscious, marketing or merchandising. ‘Spot Colour’ printing is widely used and works well with many types of graphics. Spot color printing is the appropriate procedure for graphic prints that aren’t photographic.
The colours of the inks to be used in the reproduction of the graphic images are usually Pantone specified colours chosen by a graphic designer. In order to isolate the hues of the ink in the image, Pantone coated or noncoated references are selected. An international colour reference used in publishing, printing and design whereby each colour is identified by a unique Pantone name and number and is called the Pantone matching system.
Branded promotional garments, or other merchandise where color identify and uniformity must stay constant, are particularly well suited for spot color printing.
4 Color Process is an additional technique for t-shirt printing. This method of printing is used mainly for photographic images and illustrations that consist of a wide range of colours, tones and graduations. The images found in many books and magazines and printed by the 4 colour process.
The transparent inks blend with one another on a plain white backdrop to recreate each of the colours and shades present in the original. It is a lot harder to process on fabric than it is on paper. However, the actual method used is mostly the same.
This method of tshirt printing is only useful for white garments, and will not work well on coloured fabrics.
When t-shirt printers reproduce such full colour images onto coloured fabrics a method called ‘Simulated Process’ is used. 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+ Much like spot colour printing, the art is divided into tones and colours to preserve the essential qualities of the original.
This is a standard method used by all printers and most popular for example with the reproduction of heavy metal and fantasy imagery taken from CD cover artwork and reproduced onto black t-shirts for band merchandise. 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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