[StevenSchniers]

Hey all!
Having some issues with a t-shirt our client wants printed. He requested that we lay his design down on a camouflage shirt...but the white ink isn't really taking. When we print you can see the camo design bleed through the ink clear as day. We've tried various settings (Heavy 2, Medium 3, etc.) and ran tests with lighter and heavier pretreatment coats. Putting a double coat of pretreatment down DID help the ink adhere better...but I seriously doubt it's longevity in the wash. Anyone have any tips?
Extra information: this is a REALLY thin t-shirt by a brand we have never printed with before (Code V). Attached are pictures.
Extra Extra information: We are printing on a Sprint and are NOT using content-based printing for the white layer. Our humidity is at or around 50% at all times.
Thanks everyone!

 

[Scifighter11]

Very interesting. I don't have a sprint so not of the different settings. I have an idea. Not sure of wash ability but it's a idea. I would print the image again stopping after the white. And without moving the shirt I would let the ink dry or flash dry or iron it dry and then run the shirt again. It should give you a better white base to work with. When I was using my mpower it stop durning the white process I had to reboot the printer and I tried to reprint the shirt. It work perfect but you can tell the double print on the white where it stopped the first time. But it made the colors pop. And didn't look bad at all.

 

[killerwebs]

Hello,

It looks like a little bit of pretreat inconsistency, but it may be all you can do with that type of shirt.

All shirt brands do print different, and I think thin shirts like that would not pretreat well.

 

[MarielAviles]

Steven,

I would recommend to print Underbase gray first, then white. These type of shirts are quite tricky to print due to bleeding.

 

[zoom_monster]

I've always had trouble with camo shirts. They are pigment dye and the colors do bleed into the white underbase. I've tried several brands over the last 5 years and have not found any that will consistanly give good results. Either screen them or go with the flow and let people know that this will happen.

 

[StevenSchniers]

Steven,

I would recommend to print Underbase gray first, then white. These type of shirts are quite tricky to print due to bleeding.

Never tried an underbase gray; how do you go about doing this? Still rather new to the DTG/Sprint world. Thanks!

 

[zoom_monster]

MarielAviles was mistakenly referring to screen print not inkjet. Grey under base, would not be possible (not in the true sense) with DTG.

 

[StevenSchniers]

lol I didn't think so; hence the confusion. Thanks!

 

[CoorsDTG]

A Gray underbase IS possbile. I use it on camo, tie-dye and sometimes even heather or sport gray shirts (depending on the brand.) I try to only use it on retail shirt orders where I can charge a lot more for less shirts simply because it takes longer to print each shirt...but sometimes we need to make exceptions.

Keep your white ink settings the same as you would normally but enable content based and lower your contrast to about a 0. What you're looking to do is just lay down enough ink to "break up" the pattern that is under it. Then disable content based and lay down your white layer as normal.

Plain and simply, you're not using enough ink. Your green is also bleeding into your yellow because you're not allowing the white underbase to set a little before printing your CMYK layer.

Hope this helps!

Update: If you're not sure how to do this, you want to print your gray layer with the color layer ink level at 0. This way, you can print an additional layer of white after it without it automatically wanting to lay down the color layer.