# DTG Printing Quality Not What I Had Thought.



## Sadrin (Jan 16, 2015)

Hello!
I just want to state that I'm not doing my own prints. I'm having a design printed onto black shirts for a Kickstarter project and I want to use spiffy shirts as a Backer reward. So I found a really nice company in LA. I sent them my artwork in 1:1 .png format. A few days later I got the shirts and the design looked ok from a distance but up close I could see that it was very different. The print is rather thick in texture and not soft like I heard/read DTG was. The color is a little off as it uses a lot of orange and the orange coloring has shown itself throughout the finished product even where it should not have. Also there appears to be a lot of Noise added to the print, almost as if a noise filter was added. I was told by the company that everything turned out great and no one will notice but me. So I'm turning to you guys. Is this normal? Thanks for any help!
I have photos but I can't seem to attach anything.


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## splathead (Dec 4, 2005)

Pictures would help a great deal. Can you post them to flickr or another 3rd party site and provide a link?

How many shirts are you doing? Did you consider screen printing instead of DTG?


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## ericwin (Jan 26, 2012)

When printing DTG on black shirts (or any shirt that requires a white underbase), it is going to have a heavier hand. The weight/thickness can vary based on the different equipment out there and the way the operator sets up the job. It usually has a softer hand than screen printed garments with plastisol ink. Usually you can't feel DTG ink printed on white garments so that would be the way to go if you are looking for a soft hand.

DTG is a CMYK print process. With CMYK, it is often difficult or impossible to match specific colors. If color matching is important, it is best to ask your DTG printer to give you a t-shirt that has an extensive range of CMYK colors printed in some sort of grid and then supply you with a vector or photoshop file so you can grab the CMYK blends that match the color you want for use in your artwork.

As for the noise, that probably shouldn't have been there but without more details, I can't say for sure.

Hope that helps.

Eric


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## SHORTDOG (Dec 15, 2014)

What is the name of the company? I got an order for like 50 shirts but the design has multiple colors, so I was thinking of outsourcing the work but I need it to be somewhat cheap so I can make a few $$


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## Sadrin (Jan 16, 2015)

splathead- Thanks for the reply. I uploaded some photos to imgur. Here they are. Artwork before printing.http://i.imgur.com/7TObEFQ.png Shirt http://i.imgur.com/x3ZH4AR.png
I'm not sure how many prints I'll need. I'm guessing around 200.
I don't think Screen Printing is an option for this type of design. It's very detailed and designed to look like the image is coming out of the black shirt.

ericwin - Thanks for the information! The shirts are black with a darker edged design. I wasn't sure how the white underbase worked. 

The printer asked for a .png file. I check and it was RGB. I had no idea CMYK format was apart of the process. I'll resend the graphic in CMYK.

The noise is what I don't get. It almost looks like the file was downgraded and then printed. Thanks for your insight!


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## shaneEMP (Jul 10, 2014)

"It almost looks like the file was downgraded and then printed."

any print on a textile is a downgrade from the original image


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## ericwin (Jan 26, 2012)

Sadrin said:


> ericwin - Thanks for the information! The shirts are black with a darker edged design. I wasn't sure how the white underbase worked.
> 
> The printer asked for a .png file. I check and it was RGB. I had no idea CMYK format was apart of the process. I'll resend the graphic in CMYK.
> 
> The noise is what I don't get. It almost looks like the file was downgraded and then printed. Thanks for your insight


On my printer, the amount of white underbase is variable based on the color on top of it - lighter colors have a heavier underbase, darker colors have a lighter underbase.

Most RIP's (raster image processor) usually work best with RGB color mode even though the printers are CMYK printers. I don't know exactly why this is but as I understand it, the RIP usually has a color profile that has been tweaked to convert the RGB colors into CMYK optimized for each model DTG printer. Also, I think most RIP's prefer PNG format (mine does at least) because they allow for a transparent background and PNG supports RGB (you can't have a PNG file in CMYK color mode).

Looking at your picture, normally I'd expect better quality than that. Perhaps the DTG shop you used was running at a lower resolution in order to speed up the print process or maybe their printer just isn't capable of anything better. It is hard to say. It could also be the shirt they used - a tightly woven ringspun cotton t-shirt will give you the best image result.

Eric


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## splathead (Dec 4, 2005)

From a price standpoint, 200 shirts DTG should cost more to make than 200 full color screen printed ones. What pricing are you getting for DTG? Just for the heck of it, get a quote for screen print too.


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