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I just bought a heat press and have a vinyl cutter already. I would like to know how this shirt is made. The only way I can describe it is crackle print. Thanks for your help. bc.jpg
It's screen printed. Maybe screen printed transfer, but most likely directly screen printed. The the distressed look is achieved by not printing those areas. It's all done in the graphics program pre-press.
Mister Retro makes a plugin called Machine Wash. Perfect for this type of stuff. I really recommend gettin' it. It isn't compatible with Photoshop CS4 though.
There is other ways of achieving this effect, this plugin is definitely the easiest. But if you don't wanna cop it, find some hi quality images of wrinkled paper, dirty surfaces, etc. and increase the contrast a lot then apply Threshold so it's completely black and white. Then select all of the white with Select > Color Range and white selected as your primary color, then delete the white. Then take what you have left and past it over an image you want to distress. Once you get it lined up properly and such, ctrl-click on the layer with the distress texture (Make sure you click the thumbnail on the layer, not the name) then click on the artwork layer and hit delete. This will delete the selected area. Hide the distress texture layer and presto!
The effect shown will be extremely difficult to do with vinyl and a cutter. You would have mucho weeding to do. This effect is intended to make the shirt look like it's been through the ringer, with not much print left. Most vinyls are too thick to look distressed or washed out. Depending on the quantity, screen printing would be your best option.
Agree with the screenprinting！You just need convert the image to vector file and also tell the designer
that you need put that into screenprinting. The designer will seperate colour into two layers. One is white
colour and the distressed area will be transparent. You just send the vector file to your printer, and it will
achieve the effect above. By the way,Heat Press/INKJET/LASER Transfers works well on white shirts, but doesn't work on dark shirts, cracks, fades away easily.
How is this made? 
