Best Practices for Apparel Decorators to Ensure Color Accuracy
Above image courtesy of DuPont.
Color accuracy can make or break a job, or even worse, make you lose out on business down the road. Whether you realize it or not, color accuracy plays a huge role in your success as a decorator.
According to Ray Weiss, vice president, eLearning and certifications, PRINTING United Alliance, your customer may reject an order due to color inaccuracy or inconsistency — or they may not bother telling you there was a mistake.
“If they don't reject the order, they say, ‘Look, we're going to live with it, but never call them again because they can't match the color,’” he says. “... And you've just lost a customer and you don't even know it.”
However, making sure that color is accurate is easier said than done, especially when it comes to digital processes since, compared to screen printing, the color gamut is smaller.
“[Screen printers] have so many different colors to choose from to match the colors that the customer needs,” says Scott Donovan, business development, Artistri Textile Inks and Dyes, DuPont. “Once you move over to the digital side, we only have four colors of ink that make up all those colors.”
According to Lily Hunter, product manager at Epson Professional Imaging, Epson America, everything from the environment to substrates can affect color. “For instance, if you store your papers and fabrics in, say, a humid environment, now you've got moisture in the substrates,” she says. “And if you don't acclimate it to get it to the right temperature, get the moisture out — that's going to affect your whole process. For sublimation, now you're steaming things, and your colors are going to be way off.
“Also, with fabrics, you can order the same product from the same vendor, and depending on who they get their threads from, fabrics can play a role,” she adds.
Given the challenges that color presents for apparel decorators, let’s take a look at some of the solutions.
Best Practices for Color Accuracy
Right off the bat, Weiss recommends apparel decorators and designers work with L*a*b colors versus CMYK or RGB.
“CMYK or RGB value is dependent on the color space or the device,” Weiss says. “So, on my Brother direct-to-garment printer versus my Epson direct-to-garment printer, if I gave you a CMYK value and they both have different print drivers, they're both different printers. And then who knows the material that I was printing on when I got that color? I give it to you, and you go to put it on your device, you're going to come up with a very different color.”
In the same vein, Donovan says it’s crucial to make sure that everyone is on the same page from the get-go. For instance, you can “put together a file specification list to give to your customers to tell them what files you can accept, what color spaces they're supposed to be in,” he explains. “In lots of cases, the printer has to educate the customer on how to put their files together so that they get the best out of their system.”
For direct-to-film (DTF) printing specifically, Donovan says consistency is paramount.
“That means not clicking around and adjusting print environments or print schemas in the RIP,” he explains. “Again, bringing files in that are set up the same way every time. If they're using a digital front end on the printer, not adjusting the physical properties of the printer.”
One of Hunter’s go-to methods for ensuring color consistency is creating a “recipe book.”
“There was this one business, it was near the beach,” Hunter says. “They did a sublimation process where, in the morning, they hit a certain color. In the afternoon and later in the day, no change at all — still running the same fabric from the same roll — but the colors were totally different. The main difference? There is more moisture and dampness in the air in the morning. … That affected the colors between morning and later in the day when it wasn't as cool and damp. So, it's always good to keep a record of what you're doing and the whole environment.”
Hunter advises that printing in a climate-controlled space can mitigate environmental color-matching issues.
Other Tips
Diving into the job itself, there are several steps you can take to ensure color accuracy. For one, Weiss says you could separate your substrate by white point to minimize the effects of any variation. This can be done for any job, since, for example, even shirts within the same box can have different white points.
“Inks are transparent, they're not opaque, so that white comes through,” he says. “So think: If that white has a yellowish tint or a bluish tint, it's absolutely going to affect your colors.”
Doing color checks throughout a job is a must, and Weiss says that you should have a process in place to do them. For instance, if you’re doing 100 shirts, you should check every 10th shirt, he recommends. If the shirts stay accurate, you can bump your check to every 15th shirt.
Hunter adds that checking colors throughout the job can help you avoid major issues. “I heard this story from [a shop doing sublimation] where they were doing team uniforms,” she says. “At one point — it was cut-and-sew — they would print all fronts, then they did all the backs, then the sleeves. Throughout the day, even though they didn’t change their process, they were noticing, ‘Oh my goodness, there are some slight color shifts between the front, the back, and the sleeves.’”
To remedy this, they decided to print the shirts all at once, rather than piece by piece.
Weiss also suggests having women check the color accuracy, since men are more likely to be color blind.
Tools and Resources
While these tips can guide you toward accuracy, there’s nothing like an objective measurement tool to tell you if your colors are wrong.
“Our brain is very smart when it comes to color,” Weiss says. For example, a decorator that’s printing red shirts might look at the first round coming off the press and think the red looks accurate, so they run it through the dryer. When they pull the next batch off, they might think the red looks the same, but once the piles are placed in different spots around the shop, the color looks slightly different.
“… That color could be slightly shifting, and your eyes adjust because your brain goes, ‘Oh yeah, that's still that same red,’” Weiss notes. Because of this, he suggests using a spectrophotometer, such as the handheld Nix device he has that connects with his phone and instantly shows whether his colors are good or bad.
Epson offers the SD-10 spectrophotometer, which can help you maintain color consistency over the long term. Hunter says that each color you scan with the device gets uploaded to PORT, Epson’s cloud-based system. From there, you can create your own color library that connects with a plug-in in your design application, enabling you to design with those colors and ensure consistency across jobs that use the same colors.
When it comes to RIP software, Donovan says that every manufacturer provides some form of training online, and that you should take advantage of it.
If you want to deepen your knowledge, Weiss strongly suggests checking out the iLearning+ platform, which offers a certification in color management for direct-to-garment, as well as courses surrounding color management, direct-to-garment, sublimation, and more.