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Originally Posted by Zsoltee |  | | | | | | | | | How is it possible to get smooth or no hand feel on the shirt when you're using that many layers of paint? | |  | |  | |
It is impossible to get a new hand feel when printing process onto black shirt because a solid layer of white must be laid down first. The hand is primarily created on the first white pass. Once the white has been laid down, the hand doesn't noticeably change when the CMYK inks are added.
The CMYK colors are calibrated to do 2 strokes, so the 2 strokes added together does not lay down any more ink than one uncalibrated stroke. It would be like trying to paint a white room with dark paint. You can actually use less paint when using 2 thin coats of the dark to cover the light than 1 heavy coat. If you take a look at the transfer curve attachment, you will see that i've cut back the ink transfer nearly 50%. Also in that transfer curve on the left side, i pumped up the fine highlight screens 5-10%, then at the right side, at 90% i take a quick ramp up to 100% to ensure any shadow area that is near 100% will get 100%.
Process color requires a white underbase. The less hand this can be printed with, the less hand the final result will have. Currently most of our efforts are concentrated on the color itself, but we have planned testing in the future to address the white. For example, we have just purchased a drill attachment to stir ink, so with a mechanical stir we want to see if we an use a finer mesh screen. Yesterday we used the mixer to stir a clear ink which when we opened the bucket look more like jello than an ink. After stirring, it looked smooth and creamy.
My current round of testing is to go though the sample files included with adobe illustrator. Anyone with a current version of illustrator has a vector original of the Bedlam Ballroom illustration which i've attached a photograph of a completed t-shirt. This is the shirt we used the clear coat. WOW!, did a clear coat really make a big difference on a design like this! The glossy did cause more than a few issues trying to take a photo of the shirt.
Today we are testing union triple pigment process ink rather than the union standard process. We also are going to try a finer mesh screen to produce the white underbase. From those tests, we plan to continue on through the Adobe Illustrator sample folder.
fred