# The guitar file printed on the mod1



## FredP (Jul 2, 2007)

This is an explanation of the (bad) mod1 output shown in this thread: http://www.t-shirtforums.com/direct-garment-dtg-inkjet-printing/t136523.html
It also shows a properly printed sample.


Sorry it took so long… T’is the season to run around like a mad person. Plus I don’t have access to a mod1 currently. Thanks Belquette for sending me these pics.


As I mentioned, the printout shown in the initial comparison is a misprint. I racked my brain trying to figure out what happened and last week I found out. The RIP has a setting called “white ink under black”. Default behavior is NO white under black. Some folks, however, like to put some white under black ink. I’ve heard arguments for and against this. Obviously you can’t use that on every graphic. It’s mostly used on solid areas, etc. That setting was set to 80%!! That's what caused the ugly white "bowling pin" ghost. It should have been set at zero.



Obviously the guitar is a challenging file. The challenge is that the faint orange “glow” behind the guitar looks great on a monitor but it’s hard to reproduce. If you hold it, it loses “pop”. If you get the pop back, you lose the glow. I lean towards the sharper one. If I were printing the shirt for myself, I’d choose the sharper one… but that’s just my taste.

Please note, the original file was not modified in any way to print the sample. 















Since the file has a black background you can print it either from the rip or directly from Photoshop. The results would, of course, vary based on what you have your Photoshop color management settings tuned to.


I’m expecting another picture or two of it printed with different settings. I’ll post those as I get them.


Here’s the original artwork for comparison.











[edit] This "original" is just for visual comparison. It is not the full-resolution file.


-- Fred


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## TahoeTomahawk (Apr 12, 2006)

Hi Fred, thanks for posting this and the explanation of why the previous print looked the way it did.
Can you clarify something for us, .. so the correct setting should have been checked to print white under black however the value set at 0% instead of 80%?
Or was the correct solution to uncheck the white under black and also set it to 0%?

Thanks!


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## FredP (Jul 2, 2007)

TahoeTomahawk said:


> Hi Fred, thanks for posting this and the explanation of why the previous print looked the way it did.
> Can you clarify something for us, .. so the correct setting should have been checked to print white under black however the value set at 0% instead of 80%?
> Or was the correct solution to uncheck the white under black and also set it to 0%?
> 
> Thanks!


Hi Tahoe,

Sorry, I wasn't very clear... even after editing it... twice LOL. 

Setting it to 0% turns it off. You get no white under black. That's the default and that's what that graphic should have been printed with. There's no actual "checkbox" on that, just a slider.

It probably got left on from a previous print or a demo or something. It was during a trade show after all.

-- Fred


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## Justin Walker (Dec 6, 2006)

The image looks fantastic, Fred! The only thing I would have changed would have been to adjust the sliders so it didn't knock out some of the glow around the guitar, as well as inside the main body (original image shows much more gentle glow, around the outside and inside, which does not seem to be as prevalent in the printed image). However, the colors and detail are incredible.

So aside from the "no white under black" feature, I assume you also changed a setting to tell the RIP not to print any black at all, since there is no longer a big black box around the image? Wouldn't this negate the need to reduce the amount of "white ink under black", if you simply turned off the black ink (even if white is set to print at 100% under any black pixel, it would be meaningless if there were no black pixels being printed)?

The ability to adjust both a) the strength of the white ink, under black ink (0-100%) and b) whether or not the machine prints black ink at all, provides an exceptional level of flexibility when printing on different colored substrates. For instance, on black garments we do not typically print black ink; however, IF we wanted to print black ink, I believe our RIP automatically decides to print white ink under it..... I am not exactly sure; I had better double check, when I go to the shop later....

Basically, we have a few different "Environments" that we can print from, each with its own unique settings / profiles / etc (which we can adjust, but I have not been able to find a settings to control "white ink under black", specifically). Our most common two settings are:

*BLACK GARMENTS* - Prints NO black ink, therefore no white under the black ink.

*COLOR GARMENTS* - Prints black ink, but puts white under the black ink!

If we want to print black ink on a shirt, but DON'T want the white ink to print underneath it, we have literally had to trick the printer to do this - we RIP one copy at the BLACK settings, and another copy at the COLOR settings, then take the under base from one and the color layer from the other......... Annoying, right? I guess I am going to have to double-check to see if any of the RIP's I have in my shop right now can be manually changed to control these settings individually, rather than by each environment........ We have asked different people about this, in the past, but they either didn't understand what we were asking for or didn't think it was possible - I knew the iProof RIP has had these individual adjustments, since I had my Flexi, so it seems silly that you wouldn't be able to do this with other RIP's!


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## FredP (Jul 2, 2007)

Justin Walker said:


> The image looks fantastic, Fred! The only thing I would have changed would have been to adjust the sliders so it didn't knock out some of the glow around the guitar, as well as inside the main body (original image shows much more gentle glow, around the outside and inside, which does not seem to be as prevalent in the printed image). However, the colors and detail are incredible.


Yeah, I think it looks pretty good. The boys at Belquette are going to print some additional ones with different settings, getting back some of the glow and see how we like them. The problem is that it's so close to Christmas and there's folks either on vacation or going on vacation and yet machines still need to be built and shipped so they're up to their butts in alligators over there (nice problem to have these days). As you can imagine, it's difficult to get the "extra-couricular" stuff printed but they're doing what they can to fit me in.



Justin Walker said:


> So aside from the "no white under black" feature, I assume you also changed a setting to tell the RIP not to print any black at all, since there is no longer a big black box around the image?


Correct.



Justin Walker said:


> Wouldn't this negate the need to reduce the amount of "white ink under black", if you simply turned off the black ink (even if white is set to print at 100% under any black pixel, it would be meaningless if there were no black pixels being printed)?


Haha. You get the teddy bear! Yes, that's what it's "supposed" to do. That little glitch will not be the next rev! I have to cop to that part of it, actually... it's a bug. It doesn't catch a lot of people unaware since you can see it on the screen. 




Justin Walker said:


> The ability to adjust both a) the strength of the white ink, under black ink (0-100%) and b) whether or not the machine prints black ink at all, provides an exceptional level of flexibility when printing on different colored substrates. For instance, on black garments we do not typically print black ink; however, IF we wanted to print black ink, I believe our RIP automatically decides to print white ink under it..... I am not exactly sure; I had better double check, when I go to the shop later....


Yes, normally recommended to use no black under white for black or very dark garments. Blue garments, for example would get like 50%. We decided to just give the user control over it. It's the ol' "trade-off" of automation versus flexibility. Some RIPs have very few settings and some even give you the ability to edit the artwork. I tried to aim for the middle or ther abouts.



Justin Walker said:


> Basically, we have a few different "Environments" that we can print from, each with its own unique settings / profiles / etc (which we can adjust, but I have not been able to find a settings to control "white ink under black", specifically). Our most common two settings are:
> 
> *BLACK GARMENTS* - Prints NO black ink, therefore no white under the black ink.
> 
> ...


Yeah, we have "pre defined settings" which I guess is like the different environments. The black detect threshold and the white under black are variables so they're stored as well. We ship with some standard settings built in and we let the user create their own. I guess they could have one for blue garments, one for blue garments heavy underbase, etc.

As far as the different underbases... yeah, I feel your pain. There's no single algorithm that will catch every artwork. One of the ways I tried to allow for more flexibility is that we let the user export the white layer that the RIP creates out to a TIFF file. You could then torture it a bit in photoshop and import it back in. Or, for the power users, they can just create their own from scratch and import it. Some commercial artwork stuff like the G.D. stuff comes with the underbase and highlight layers already separated so I guess you could use them verbatim.

There are new revisions coming pretty soon on our dtg stuff. I've been away from it for a while, off writing direct-to-plate and film RIPs for OEMs but truth be known... the dtg versions are my favorites.

-- Fred


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## FredP (Jul 2, 2007)

As promised, here's another pic printed with slightly different settings. This one keeps a bit more of the orange glow. Thanks again, Belquette. I know you guys are quite busy.

As an added bonus, you can actually watch this shirt be printed... twice! (see YouTube link below the pic).  












 

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATfXTgpULfM[/media]



-- Fred


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## red514 (Jul 21, 2009)

very nice, this second print is a nice upgrade, you get allot more of the glow. There's still a big difference between the original file and the final print, there's much more of the red glow in the original and the colors are more rich and vibrant.

There's more glow in the second print but less detail in the flames, the reds look very orange. In the first print there's more red tones it seems, adding to the detail of the flames.

Is the difference between the two just in the underbase? what are the different settings?


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

> As promised, here's another pic printed with slightly different settings. This one keeps a bit more of the orange glow. Thanks again, Belquette. I know you guys are quite busy.


Just curious, is the photo of the t-shirt graphic after the print has been fully cured, or is that still wet?


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## FredP (Jul 2, 2007)

red514 said:


> very nice, this second print is a nice upgrade, you get allot more of the glow. There's still a big difference between the original file and the final print, there's much more of the red glow in the original and the colors are more rich and vibrant.


Yes, the original is more vibrant than any of the prints... by anyone.



red514 said:


> There's more glow in the second print but less detail in the flames, the reds look very orange. In the first print there's more red tones it seems, adding to the detail of the flames.


Agreed. Could be a profile selection... not really sure. It _can_ obviously hold the detail (as in the first). 




red514 said:


> Is the difference between the two just in the underbase? what are the different settings?


Not sure what the actual differences in the settings are but the underbase is certainly one. I'll have a mod1 in-house here pretty shortly and I'll investigate. Our users normally use transparent backgrounds rather than black. That seem to yield much better results. I'll probably end up making some improvements (either in settings or code) based on these prints. The goal is to keep the pop shown in the first AND the glow shown in this one. Which, by the way, if you're willing to "touch the artwork" you could do it in about 45 seconds in photoshop.  



-- Fred


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## FredP (Jul 2, 2007)

Rodney said:


> Just curious, is the photo of the t-shirt graphic after the print has been fully cured, or is that still wet?


The shirt was cured.

-- Fred


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## Belquette (Sep 12, 2005)

FredP said:


> I'll have a mod1 in-house here pretty shortly and I'll investigate.
> 
> -- Fred


Yes, we will get something together for you this week! 

Having the hardware in house will be quite beneficial as the _RIP and hardware do need to work together as a team_ to provide the best in both quality and daily output which is why I thought is was important to show the guitar image actually being printed in real time. 

Maybe some of the other RIP and Printer combination's mentioned in this discussion could provide a similar video printing 2 images? _As they say it's worth a 1000 words..._

It's amazing how well the RIP preforms without ever having one beside you to test with, this has only been possible since there are similarities in platforms, but there are other factors at play that separates those similarities, so think of what's to come when the RIP for the virtual printer becomes one Fred can actually touch..... lets see what transpires in 2011?


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