Today we tried our first 4 color process printing, and I must say it went well. There are flesh tones, fading gold, black lettering, red boxing gloves, and a big green clover leaf as a back ground.....all on a white cotton t. It's all in the screen software, and the knowledge to use it correctly. Of course, registration is the main key. You've got to leave the reg marks on the screen until it's perfect. And your press can't have any play. We are using only one employee to run the squeegee, so that the prints will be consistent. We will run 1000 on a 4 station, 6 color press, and through a Hix curing oven.When I figure out how to post pic's, I will get them on here.
It is not as difficult as some may think. It does take patience to learn the righ amount of strokes to acchieve each color.
RW
Last edited by rwshirts; March 6th, 2008 at 08:52 PM.
Reason: Additional info
Cookiesa....we used what we had at the shop. We did have some 305 screens, which is what you should use, and we thought of giving it a whirl. It just wouldn't have looked right with standard screenprinting.....too much "hand" with all the ink needed. Plus....process printing is "wet on wet", which speeds up the process by not requireing a flash (unless printing a white underbase on a dark shirt.
Today we tried our first 4 color process printing, and I must say it went well. There are flesh tones, fading gold, black lettering, red boxing gloves, and a big green clover leaf as a back ground.....all on a white cotton t. It's all in the screen software, and the knowledge to use it correctly. Of course, registration is the main key. You've got to leave the reg marks on the screen until it's perfect. And your press can't have any play. We are using only one employee to run the squeegee, so that the prints will be consistent. We will run 1000 on a 4 station, 6 color press, and through a Hix curing oven.When I figure out how to post pic's, I will get them on here.
It is not as difficult as some may think. It does take patience to learn the righ amount of strokes to acchieve each color.
RW
would love to see a pic looks like we are also going to go down this road so i am sure i will have a ton of questions....lol
Postscript output devices all that a built in ability to adjust the calibration. The easies way to access the postscript function using the transfer function inside of photoshop. This same function has the ability to be embeded in the printer driver using by adding it to the printers Postscript printer description (.ppd) file.
When the film and exposure is correct, you should be able to print a graduated screen using a standard print stroke and have the resulting print look like the graduated stroke on the computer monitor.
Without the film being calibrate, the typical results is that on the light end, the smaller screen percentages get lost and on the dark side of the scale it all fills into 100% black.
fred
__________________
A day late, a dollar short, so it goes.
A good analogy is trying to play a guitar, which is out of tune. Rather than tuning the instrument, you have managed to find where on the untuned guitar that you can hold and strum to produce music. My suggestion is that by learning to tune the instrument, rather than modify the playing technique to compensate for an untuned instrument.
Tuning a press is much like tuning a guitar, but instead of a simple plucking of a string, it requires a screen to be produced and tested.
To produce quality process color, it takes a dedication to quality. If done properly, quality will become automatic. Without the investment of time to make it automatic, the results will remain random.
fred
__________________
A day late, a dollar short, so it goes.
We tried 4 color process printing today.... 
