# Displaying shirts on a website that contain brightly colored designs



## lincolnapparel (Nov 21, 2009)

Anybody have any advice on making T-shirts with complex, brightly colored designs look correct in a picture on a website? It's what I love to create and what I'm known for, but it seems I can never get the colors quite exactly right when adjusting them in the GIMP. I've even taken to using the GIMP and layers to "photoshop" my designs onto template T-shirts for the images on the front page of my site, but I still can't seem to get things to look quite right.

It's an even bigger problem with a shirt like "Hair Metal Lincoln" (since it involves metallic ink, so it'll look different depending on lighting and the angle). (I hope this link isn't considered spam - it's just to show you the kind of thing I'm having trouble with)

The reason I'm asking this is because I love making fun, brightly colored designs like this, and they're my best sellers overall by far, and in person (which is how I make >80% of my sales) everybody really likes them! Of course, in person, they can see the whole shirt, hold it up, feel it, try it on, etc.

On my website, though, I've noticed that the "drab" ones tend to sell better. I've wondered if this is because bright colors are hard to capture properly in a picture. It's irritating, since I like creating complex brightly colored designs and I'm moving away from more "drab" designs artistically.

Any ideas for making the brighter ones look better, or are there just some shirts that just look a lot better in person than they do on a website? (Of course, how it looks in person is the most important in the end.  )

I do have a fan photos page that I created in part to help with this issue. My website is in my signature.


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## starchild (Jul 22, 2009)

New Breed Girl is a brand/site focused on brightly printed neon shirts and girls that want to have fun. 

You can find a lot of inspiration there.

Take each part of their site, components, navigation, background, image presentation and everything else, apart, piece by piece - piece by piece..

Then appropriate


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## lincolnapparel (Nov 21, 2009)

It looks to me like they basically photoshopped their their designs onto T-shirt templates with a brightly colored background/pattern layered underneath, and the saturation cranked up (with other brightly colored backgrounds throughout the site). I've thought about adding backgrounds to my site, but haven't since I've always worried that they'd detract from the T-shirt images and designs themselves.

I had to turn Flash and Javascript on to view the site properly, though (something I want to avoid for my site), but a lot of those things look like they could be done using CSS.

I'm still not sure how I'd get a shirt with shiny metallic ink to look right on a website though. It's kind of hard to reproduce that effect in a picture.


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## bweavernh (Jun 26, 2008)

My wife liked a few of New Breed Girl's designs.


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