Personal T-shirt Printing Plate Making Process (I)

This year's harvest year for printing T-shirts, various street-showing colorful T-shirts are all colorful and lead the fashion trend. A T-shirt show presents us in front of us. Wearing a comfortable and appropriate T-shirt will make it even more visible. Energetic, although the T-shirt looks simple, but it is precisely because of this simple style but also with other clothing features flexible, more and more favored and loved by consumers, especially young people and fashion people Chase. The business is seeing this huge consumer market, competing to open a family T-shirts store, processing plant.

Although the style of the T-shirt is simple, its fabrics and styles (printing) are quite diverse. If different fabrics are used to differentiate T-shirts from high school to low grades, the flower-shaped styles have a direct impact on sales of T-shirts. General T-shirts can be divided into functional sports shirts, casual shirts, cultural shirts, corporate shirts, and artistic shirts.

T-shirt printing is mostly based on flat-screen printing, and flat-screen printing process is divided into pre-print design, color separation plate making, printing plate, printing, etc. This article only introduces T-shirt printing prepress technology, interested friends. You can use this to create a very artistic T-shirt.

The manuscript can also be called a black and white manuscript, a color separation manuscript, a negative plate, and so on. Its main function is for photolithography. Therefore, the manuscript must be drawn on a light-transmitting substrate. The image is a light-impermeable ink layer (black or red). The transparency of the substrate and the shading density of the ink layer are Determine the key indicators for the quality of the manuscript. The manuscript draft image is mainly formed by manual drafting, manual or mechanical drawing, photocopying, laser photocopying, printer drafting, and other methods of production, but also the use of ordinary paper draft light treatment (such as oil) as a draft.

1. Separation type

T-shirt design color separation methods are mainly two categories: spot color separation and primary color separation.

T-shirt design spot color separation refers to using any special deployment of a good color alone as a printing color, from such a number of spot colors through color printing to form a color image. The six sets of color printing and twelve-color printing that we usually talk about means that six spot colors or twelve spot colors are sequentially overprinted to form a color image printing 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 (but the spot color requirements here are semi-transparent, fine-printing materials), so five spot colors can also be Six colors or even more than seven colors are printed. Spot color printing is mainly used for color printing. Its reflection of natural scenes can only be simulated rather than reduced. This is the biggest difference from the original color printing. However, with the popularization of screen printing technology and the development of new inks, spot color screen printing has risen in recent years. Especially in T-shirt printing, the most advanced T-shirt printing technology in the world is not a primary color printing. Is a spot color screen printing, that is, in the color, especially black T-shirts on a number of color spot color screen printing, screening mode is also gradually changing from conventional AM screening to FM screening.

The primary color separation refers to the decomposition of the natural color image into three primary colors (magenta, cyan, and yellow) for the purpose of performing the three primary color tone printing so as to restore the object image. Any color in the natural world is composed of three primary colors, so in theory, the three-color version of the cyan, magenta, and yellow colors can be used to print realistic restored images, but due to various factors, it is difficult for the three primary color prints to achieve this. A little bit. Therefore, four-color printing is usually used in printing practice, namely three primary colors plus black. In recent years, in order to restore the colors more vividly 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 colors of orange, purple, and green on a four-color basis. Separated to achieve high fidelity by reducing grayscale in printing. In order to differentiate from spot color printing, we usually refer to the original color printing (which can be understood as reducing color printing) by performing the color separation of natural color patterns by optical or digital technology. It is related to optics and color science. The concept of primary colors (only three primary colors) is different.

In the international community, the latest development of color printing is the combination of primary colors and spot colors for primary color printing, which has played both the strengths of the two, complement each other, and has a more advanced printing effect, belonging to the fine print. This has also been brought into full play in T-shirt printing. Given the diversity of printed materials, the design of spot colors and primary color aliasing patterns based on their special printing process characteristics will produce even a very ordinary T-shirt. Amazing design level. In the International Screen Printing and Billboard Industry Exhibition, a T-shirt with a total of 12 colors has been displayed. In addition to the four primary colors, there are also 8 sets of spot colors, of which the foam printing and the crystal paste printing are special. The sensation is strong and the special part is shining and amazing.

Professional T-shirt designers generally follow the principle of spot color or primary colors for composition design. After obtaining such a design draft, they can perform color separation only according to their requirements. However, there are also some non-professional designers or customers who only provide originals such as various pictures or drafts and require them to be printed on T-shirts. In this case, we must communicate with designers and customers: first we must understand its intentions, what kind of effects to express, what kind of fabrics to use, and to adapt to the color of this fabric, in order to achieve this effect Is it better to use spot color printing or to use original color printing? Even the original color printing? At this time, it is necessary to provide them with T-shirts with different printing methods so that they can understand and select them. Secondly, they should tell them about the production cost of spot color printing and primary color printing so that they can make decisions based on their investment plans.

2. Separation of manuscripts

Separation of manuscripts is used to produce the corresponding separation screens. One of its quality requirements is that the light transmission performance of the substrate is good, the second is the high shading density of the image, and the third is the alignment accuracy between the dichroic sheets. Fourth, the edges of the image lines are clean and tidy, and the outlets are full and clear.

(1) Multi-color separations The positioning of cross-colored sheets is generally based on the crosshairs, but it is often easy to reverse the separations during the printing process, or to make mistakes on the front and back, or to turn the graphics upside down, in the bottom left corner of the film. CMYK and other color film symbols are distinguished, which is not only easy to align but also difficult to mistake the film.

(2) Since the red tear film is expensive and not easily available, it can be replaced with an opaque and timely sticker. As long as the original manuscript or linear draft is pasted with opaque paper, and the time-sensitive sticker is stuck on the PVC film (or glass), it can be engraved with a cutting knife. Of course, it is also possible to use the computer cutting plotter to output the manuscript directly to the glass.

(3) If the two printing plate patterns are not connected or overprinted, you can consider drawing two color drafts on one sheet, and print them in two versions when the printing is in progress. The A version closes the B pattern and the B version is closed. A pattern. It is even possible to burn a plate, add an ink barrier between AB patterns, and print two colors at once.