T-shirt printing pre-press process (1)

Editor's note: Some people say that traditional printing has entered the era of low profit, and printing companies are also moving from production to service. Personalized digital printing, personalized printing has gradually entered our lives, these two documents will tell the readers about the prepress process of T-shirt personalized printing.

1. Basic knowledge of T-shirt design

T-shirt design (pattern design) has active design and passive design. Active design is mainly used for the production of commodity T-shirts. Designers can exert subjective creativity without any restrictions. Basically, any object and any graphic art can be used to create T-shirt patterns. Passive design mainly refers to the creative design of advertising T-shirts, travel T-shirts, commemorative T-shirts, etc., subject to certain restrictions, to be carried out under the constraints of achieving a certain intention.

To design a T-shirt, you must first master the basic process of T-shirt printing, but also understand the printing technology level of the producer and the T-shirt printing equipment used. For example, T-shirts with colored fabrics have always been printed with water-based glue coatings, but if the producer masters the production technology of thermosetting plastic printing ink and purchases the corresponding equipment (mainly T-shirt printing machine, infrared dryer, Infrared T-shirt oven, etc.), he can use thermosetting ink to print and process colorful fabric T-shirts. The glue printing and the thermosetting ink printing have different requirements for the design of the pattern. The glue can only be printed with a simple color block pattern, and the thermosetting ink can be screened with a transitional tone printing, not only on white T-shirts. For primary color screen printing, spot color screen printing can also be performed on dark T-shirts. If the pattern designed by the designer does not match the technical process mastered by the producer, the printed pattern will not reach the original intention and effect of the designer, and may not even be printed at all. Therefore, T-shirt designers must be proficient in T-shirt printing process, especially excellent T-shirt designers will pay close attention to the development status and technical characteristics of the latest T-shirt printing materials and printing equipment in the world, in order to Quickly use the latest technological achievements to produce novel and unique T-shirts.

In industrially developed countries, T-shirt designers are often independent professionals. They founded their own T-shirt designers or companies, and they sold their ideas and designs to T-shirt factories, T-shirt operators, advertising companies and other customers. Such T-shirt design companies often consider three issues first when designing: 1. Customer requirements; 2. Using the latest T-shirt printing technology to achieve a unique artistic effect; 3. The best cost-profit ratio.

Color tone screen printing technology has been popularized and developed rapidly in China in recent years, and screen printing technology has also been gradually adopted in T-shirt printing. At the same time, the popularity and competition of computer desktop publishing systems have greatly reduced the production cost of color separation and screening. Now it is very convenient and cheap for us to produce color separation and screening. This progress is like the progress from letterpress printing to offset printing in the printing industry. T-shirt designers get rid of the design restrictions of color block patterns (except for glue printing), and have a larger creative space, whether it is photo effects or painting effects. Still the inkjet effect can now be easily reproduced on T-shirts by screen-printing technology. This is an advancement of contemporary science and technology, and it also puts forward requirements for T-shirt designers to master digital technology.

Second, the plate making

The plate-making manuscript can also be called black-and-white manuscript, color separation manuscript, plate-making negative film, etc. Its main function is to print the photosensitive printing template, so the plate-making manuscript must be drawn on the transparent substrate, and its image is the opaque ink layer (black or red), the transparency of the substrate and the shading of the ink layer Density is a key indicator that determines the quality of plate making. The image making of plate-making manuscripts mainly uses manual drawing, manual or mechanical engraving, photosensitive copying, laser phototypesetting, printer printing and other production methods. .

1. Separation

There are two main types of color separation: spot color separation and primary color separation.

Spot color separation means that any specially formulated color is used alone as a printing color, and a color image is formed by such several spot colors through register printing. The five-color printing and twelve-color printing that we usually talk about refer to the five-color or twelve-color printing in sequence to form a color image printed product. However, the number of spot colors is not equal to the number of colors in the image, because spot colors can also be overprinted, so five spot colors can also print six sets of seven or eight colors. Spot color printing is mainly used for color block printing, and its reflection on the natural scene can only be simulated rather than restored, which is the biggest difference from primary color printing. However, with the development of screen printing technology and the development of new inks, spot color screen printing has emerged in recent years, especially in T-shirt printing, the most advanced T-shirt printing technology with the latest international t-shirt patterns. It is not a primary color printing but a spot color screen printing, that is, a multi-color spot color screen printing is performed on a color, especially a black T-shirt.

Primary color separation refers to the decomposition of natural color images into three primary colors (magenta, cyan, and yellow), so that the three primary colors can be adjusted and printed to achieve the purpose of restoring the object image. Any color in nature is composed of three primary colors, so in theory, cyan, magenta, yellow, and three color plates can be used to print realistic reproduction images. However, due to various factors, the three primary colors are difficult to achieve. At this point. Therefore, four-color printing is commonly used in printing, that is, three primary colors plus black. In recent years, in order to restore colors more realistically in the world, six-color printing and seven-color printing have been developed on the basis of four-color printing. The principle is to combine the composite colors orange, purple, green and other colors on the basis of four colors. Separated in order to reduce the grayscale in printing to achieve high fidelity. In order to distinguish from spot color printing, we usually call the reductive printing of natural color patterns through optical or digital technology to separate colors, which is called primary color printing (can be understood as reductive color printing), which is different from optical and chromatics. The concept of primary colors (only three primary colors) is different.

It is worth mentioning here that primary color printing and spot color printing are not incompatible. In the international arena, the latest development of color printing is the combination of primary colors and spot colors for spot primary color printing, which exerts the strengths of the two, complements each other, has a more advanced printing effect, and belongs to high-quality printing. This has also been allowed to play in T-shirt printing. I have seen a T-shirt made in the United States with a total of 12 colors of printing. In addition to the four primary colors, there are also eight sets of spot colors. In addition to gold and silver colors, especially foam printing and crystal slurry printing, its effect Not only is the three-dimensional sense very strong and the special parts are shiny, it is really amazing.

Professional T-shirt designers will generally design and compose according to the principle of spot colors or primary colors. After getting such a design draft, you only need to separate colors according to their requirements. However, there are some non-spot color designers or customers who only provide originals such as various pictures or drafts to print them on T-shirts. In this case, we have to communicate with the designer and the client: first of all, we must understand their creative intent and what effect to express. In order to achieve this effect, is it better to use spot color printing or primary color printing? Even special primary color printing? At this time, T-shirts with different printing methods should be provided for them to understand and choose; secondly, the production and processing costs of spot color printing and primary color printing should be told to them so that they can make decisions based on their investment plans.

2. Separation plate making draft

Separation plate making is used to produce the corresponding separation screen printing plate. The quality requirement is that the substrate has good light transmission performance, second, the image shading density is high, and third, the color registration accuracy between the dichroic films should be accurate, and the image line edges are neat and tidy, and the dots are full and clear.

(1) The positioning of multiple sets of color separation plates is generally based on crosshairs, but it is often easy to put the separation plates upside down during the printing process, or make mistakes on the front and back, or the graphics are upside down. Use the method of right oblique to position the crosshair, that is, the left side is +, the right side is x, so that the error is eliminated.
(2) Since the price of red tear film is relatively expensive and not easy to buy, it can be replaced with red self-adhesive paper. As long as the red self-adhesive is only attached to the PVC book film (covered on the original or line draft), it can be carved with a knife. Since the light transmittance of red self-adhesive paper is far inferior to that of red tear film, the light of the light drawing table should be brighter. In this way, the price is low, the shading effect is good, and the lines are smooth and clean, not afraid of water and moisture, and the better is that it is easy to modify-just peel off and re-engrave, and the red tear can not be re-engraved, ink painting Only minor changes can be made.
(3) If the patterns of the two printed color plates are not connected or overprinted, you can consider drawing the two color drafts on a film. When printing the two plates, the A version is closed with the B pattern and the B version is closed. A pattern. You can even print a plate, add an ink ribbon between the AB patterns, and print two colors at the same time with one plate.

3. Manual production

Hand-made manuscript is the most basic traditional method, mainly for hand-painted manuscript and hand-engraved manuscript.
Manual drafting tools mainly include: light drawing table (OA table), drawing ink pen, drawing compass, set square, curve plate, paper knife, steel ruler, drawing PVC book film, PCV book film drawing ink, red tear film, red Self-adhesive paper, etc.

T-shirts are hand-made. First, there is a light-drawing table. The light source is generally a fluorescent lamp. If you use an incandescent lamp, you should use frosted glass or paste a layer of copy paper under the glass so that the light is soft and does not hurt your eyes. If you need to draw pictures at home or in the temporary field, the emergency method is to put the square stool on the ground, put a piece of glass on the four stool legs, and put a table lamp under it, you can use it.

For drawing ink pens, most of them use needle pens, and the diameter of the pen head is 0.2 ~ 1.3mm. To prevent the pen tip from clogging, you can put a piece of hollow cotton (or sponge, etc.) in a bottle, add half a bottle of water, and insert the pen into the bottle when the drawing pen is disabled, so that the pen head can no longer be blocked.

Steel ruler is used to engrave red tear film and self-adhesive paper. When drawing with a triangular plate, a curved plate, etc., the beveled side should be face down to avoid the ink being dragged by the ruler.

General drawing ink can not be used to draw the film, because its drying is slow, the fastness is poor, and it will dissolve in water and return to moisture in rainy days. It is best to use a special thin film drawing ink for drawing PVC film. If you can't buy it at the moment, you can also use Yidege ink, but you need to boil it for thickening. When applying a large area of ​​graphics with Yidege ink, make sure that the ink layer is not too thick to avoid cracking.

Before hand-painting the manuscript, be sure to wash your hands with soap, because the grease on the hand will affect the ink painting.

Draw according to the paste and overprinting sequence used. The printing paste has hiding power, so the graphic contact lines of each color manuscript can be overprinted, and even light-colored manuscripts can be used as the base color of dark graphics. If the fabric is darker in color, you can consider playing a white background. The order of drawing the color separation of the glue printing is exactly the opposite of its printing process, that is, first draw the dark draft, then the light draft, and finally the white draft.

The water slurry is mainly used for printing white T-shirts, and is a transparent printing coating. Therefore, the overprinting of the contact lines between the color drafts of the color separation draft is 1 ~ 2mm. If there is too much overprinting, the composite color of two-color overprinting is easy to appear. The order of the sketches is to first draw the color draft with outlines (usually black), and then draw the draft from light to dark in turn based on this diaphragm.

The color separation sheet of the foamed printing plate should have room for the foaming slurry to swell, with a high foaming of about 1 to 2 mm and a low foaming of about 0.5 to 1.0 mm.

The basic requirements for hand-painted (engraved) manuscripts are smooth lines, smoothness, and cleanliness. The ink manuscripts drawn must generally be trimmed with a knife, especially at sharp corners.

4. Computerized digital production

With the development of computer technology and production, computerized digital design, drafting and drafting have become quite popular in China. Compared with manual drafting and photo-engraving, it has the advantages of higher quality, faster speed, more convenient production, and increasingly low cost. In particular, the quality of its color separation and screening is far more than that of manual and The level of optoelectronic production has become a widely used production method.

A series of work such as the design, color separation, screening, and film production of T-shirt patterns on the computer must be completed by operating professional graphic design software and publishing software. General-purpose software such as Adobe LIIustrator, photoshop, CoreIDraw, etc. are mainly used for the design and production of image and text, but it will be more convenient if the domestic professional screen printing and publishing software such as Wenyuange and Mengtai are used.

The program for digitizing the T-shirt pattern through the computer is generally as follows: graphic input—design editing—effect color draft—color separation—screening—setting screen angle—output. If it is handed over to professionals for production, some technical requirements must be reported: First, the color separation intention. Whether it is primary color separation or spot color separation or spot color separation, etc., must make the production staff clear. 2. Screening. The screen printing of T-shirt printing is generally less than 60 lines, and the limitation of the number of screen lines depends on factors such as the production characteristics of the printing material, fabric texture and color. Glue printing is usually not suitable for screen printing. In special cases, screen printing technology is used, and the number of screen lines should be below 40 lines. The number of screen lines for slurry printing is generally about 50 lines. The screen number of hot melt ink can be selected from 35 to 60 lines. If the fabric is darker, the line number of 35 to 45 can be used to obtain a stronger covering power of the printing ink. The foaming ink and crystal ink should be thicker. It should not be thin. The number of lines on a white background should be thicker than the lines of other printing colors. Due to the never-plugging characteristics of hot-melt inks, 70 to 80-line screens can also be used. The dot shape of T-shirt printing usually adopts oval and round dots. 3. The angle of T-shirt netting is generally at intervals of 15`, usually starting from 5`. The screen angle of the seventh color starts every 20` (still 15` apart). 4. In particular, the production staff should be reminded that the positive picture, that is, the positive picture on the front, is different from the usual printing plate making.

The main methods of output are:

(1) Printer draft. Inkjet printers, laser printers, and wax-jet printers can be used. Laser printers have a higher purchase cost but a slightly lower cost. Inkjet printers have a lower purchase cost but ink has a higher cost. The wax-jet printer (also known as a dry printer) ) Purchase costs and use costs are high. In terms of the quality of the drawn film, the wax-jet printer is the best, the laser printer is also good, and the inkjet printer is poor.
(2) Engraving of engraving machine. That is, the computer engraving machine is used to engrave the pattern on the red (black) self-adhesive paper and then paste it on the PVC book film, but the engraving machine is not as accurate as the printer, and can only be used for printing with low precision.
(3) Laser phototypesetting. Laser phototypesetting is the highest quality method of making film. It is just because the laser phototypesetting equipment is quite expensive, and only the plate-making center with a certain scale will be configured, so generally the edited software is sent to the plate-making center to produce the film. The price is higher than the printer draft, but the quality is much better.

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