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 the appropriate procedure for graphic prints that aren’t photographic.
A graphic designer usually chooses the ink colours used to reproduce the graphic images, and they are all Pantone specified. Pantone coated or noncoated color types are selected to clarify the ink hues of the pattern. The Pantone system is a global standard for colour matching where every colour is assigned a unique designation.
Spot colour printing is well suited to printing branded promotional garments or items in which colour identity and uniformity needs to stay the same throughout a varying range of items.
The Four Color Process is another method used in tshirt screen printing. This is the best way to print photographs and illustrations which contain broad colour ranges, tones, and graduations. All magazines and books use this four-color printing process as well.
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 method employed is essentially the same.
This t-shirt printing method only works well on white garments and is unsuitable for coloured fabrics.
This type of printing is only right for use in print runs of one hundred or more. This is because it simply costs more to set it up. A process called “Simulated Process” is used in cases where t-shirt printers copy full colour pictures using coloured cloths. The artwork is separated into various colours and shades using a method similar to spot colour printing to achieve the overall look and feel of the original image.
Most t-shirt printers use this method, and it is especially popular when used to copy fantasy and heavy metal album artwork onto shirts to be sold by the band. Due to the higher set up prices which includes the separating of the colour as well as an increased amount of colours used to print the pictures, this works out to be the most expensive way of printing.
