do you mean buying a press?
I use photoshop with GhostScript to print films on an epson 3000 printer and get great films, great detail, but it has to start with good artwork.
I have yet to figure out how to tell Illustrator that it is printing on films so it prints slowly and darkly enough.
Some people in the industry also like Corel Draw, but I've never used it.
I basiically want to do some local bulk print jobs, and then take my t shirts around to events and such to sell them, on top of selling them on my website. I have a funny t shirt website that is about 8 months old now, and i use cafepress for most of it due to me only having a heat press. I basically want to cut out that middle man.
do you mean buying a press?
I use photoshop with GhostScript to print films on an epson 3000 printer and get great films, great detail, but it has to start with good artwork.
I have yet to figure out how to tell Illustrator that it is printing on films so it prints slowly and darkly enough.
Some people in the industry also like Corel Draw, but I've never used it.
do you mean buying a press?
I use photoshop with GhostScript to print films on an epson 3000 printer and get great films, great detail, but it has to start with good artwork.
I have yet to figure out how to tell Illustrator that it is printing on films so it prints slowly and darkly enough.
Some people in the industry also like Corel Draw, but I've never used it.
If you're printing solid spot colors directly out of Illustrator and you get better results from Ghostscript, why not just print you Illustrator art to a .ps file and print it out of Ghostscript? I run just about everything out of ghostscript now since it's on my PC and I do all my art on a Mac.
It depends on the art work. If you use Photoshop you'll probably want to print simulated process sometime so you either have to learn how to produce separations or pay someone to do them for you.
Beware about a casual recommendation of Photoshop. Photoshop is a bitmap program for photographs made from thousands of colors. It can be used to make spot colors, but nobody would pick Photoshop as their first choice to make spot colors.
Screen printing on textiles by definition is a spot color process and you can tell from this person's questions that they don't know how to screen print.
An average textile press will have 4-6 heads and that means 4-6 colors. Photoshop is not great at 4-6 colors.
Mark Twain wrote: "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
If the only graphics program you have is Photoshop, you will have to take special steps to MAKE art in spot colors. Illustration or drawing programs like Illustrator or CorelDRAW are better for spot colors where at least you can trace colors as a form of separation.
Separation will be agony if you have imported a full color scan or digital picture.
The digital files will need to be reduced to 4-6 colors. For that you can teach yourself the complicated steps to reduce the colors or buy a separation plug-in like FastFILMS for Photoshop, or the stand alone program Spot Process that separates .tiff files into 8 standard spot colors of the color wheel.
Next steps: Postscript output to an inkjet printer, screen exposure, washout, printing press and curing oven.
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How are you measuring? retired Ulano Technical Support Screen printing since 1979 - SGIA Academy Member
Last edited by RichardGreaves; February 10th, 2008 at 04:03 PM.
Program to use 
