Discuss the various aspects of direct to garment printing. DTG printers include Brother, T-Jet, Flexi-Jet, DTG Kiosk, Kornit, Mimaki, Tex-Jet and others! Discuss and learn about this up and coming printing technology.
Can any one using Corel Draw to print please post the settings that you use in Corel Draw and also in your RIP? The colours I see on my screen are not the same colours I get when I print.
Hope this gets you going in the right direction. To fully understand color management, you are going to need to take a course or two. Some many things can affect the way your colors come out.
print out a color chart and have a color pallete that corresponds with that color chart.
this is what I do too. Print out a color chart on a spare t-shirt, and keep that as a referrence when coloring your art work. This helps alot, I found it frustrating when I had the color just right on the screen, but didnt print out what I had seen.
Thanks DA Guide. I have a Flexi Jet "S" and use the RIP that came with it. One Question: Before I print the color chart, do I have to change any settings in Corel Draw or my RIP and then use these same settings all the time as long as I select my color from the printed chart?
The problem is that Corel wants to convert any object back into a CMYK color space and use SWOP to print it out. This is not going to give you the best colors. Printing in an RGB mode is the best thing to do. In order to overwrite Corel's engine, you will need to have your profiles in the correct color folder on your hard drive. I have no clue if the Flexi RIP drops them into this folder like the MultiRIP does or not.
The bottom line is no matter what settings you have in the RIP or in Corel, you need to write them down when you print your color chart. Thus, if you want to reproduce the same colors that you have on the color chart, you know what settings to use in the RIP and Corel to get it. I would recommend you printing a couple of different color charts using different settings and see which one works best for your printer, your inks and your t-shirts. Changing any one of these variables or settings in the graphics or printing software will most likely change your colors.
Any time I ever printed out of Corel (rarely) I have alway turned off all of Corel's color management and let the printer handle it, I dont really like corel that much though (except for the grid marks on the printable area, that's kinda cool).
Have you ever stopped by the dtginks forums? There is a lot of good info there as well.
Thanks for the info. I once used photoshop to print a design that was processed in Corel. Had to save the design as a jpeg before importing into photoshop.
I to am having a problem printing on black shirts with my DTG in corel. The manual tells you to make the page black in page layout, but when I print it's printing the entire size (13x22). When I spoke with Tech support, they told me to make the page color 400% black, but can't get corel to accept that. I am now using Paintshop Pro, which is one extra step, but I was wasting too much ink.
Returning to color chart:
You should be able to print it out directly from Your rip server
Example: Menu -> Print pages -> Color Charts
If You are printing vector image, I would suggest to continue in CorelDraw
1) mark the element
2) go to fill tool -> uniform fill -> in 'Palettes' choose 'Pantone matching system' -> in 'name' type in number or name from Your Pantone colour chart of Your rip server -> o.k.
A reason people have issues printing from Corel is when you print to a PostScript devices (which is what most users will be using for DTG) is all your vector artwork colors are converted to CMYK in the File-Print process even if you used RGB during the design (same for bitmaps but you can select in the Misc tab to override this).
If you use PhotoShop it doesnt do this.
If you send CMYK data and all you ICC profiles are not setup correctly (inthe RIP and Corel) you will have color issues.
A simple work around is instead of using File-Print, publish to PDF instead and so long as your RIP supports PDF you can just add this to your RIP and Corel doesnt change the color space on your objects. So you should then get the same as PhotoShop colors.
Another note: If you take Corel data into PhotoShop to print be careful of antialiasing. By default PhotoShop will antialias objects such as text and if you are printing this with an underbase the antialiasing can create white halos around these objects. Best to switch off antialiasing in PhotoShop or if you create the bitmap from Corel dont use it.
But PDF directly to the RIP should not have this problem.
I agree with David. All the iProof RIPs will allow you to drop in a PDF file into the RIP, but the problem is that it flattens the file. So you will need to use the Color Layer Auto Mask (Black Bgrd) setting. You will have access to all the RIP settings, but they are laid out a little differently.
What I recommend to most people is to buy Photoshop Elements. It is only around $60 or so and will be well worth it if you are using a dtg printer. It does not give you all the bells and whistles of the full Photoshop version, but it does give you basically everything a dtg printer needs in my opinion.
Print settings for Corel Draw 
Re: Print settings for Corel Draw 
