During the course of 16 years creating artwork and separations for screen printing, my company, Great Dane Graphics, has witnessed plenty of change — but none so transformative as the influx of digital direct-to-garment inkjet printers. The beauty of these machines is that setup times are a thing of the past; also, there are no films needed, no screens to burn, no messy emulsion. You just make your art file look good and print it. And there’s the key to using digital direct-to-garment printers — making your art file look good.

Some art files might seem fine when you first open them, but getting topquality inkjet prints on fabric can require quite a few adjustments in your graphics software. The good news is that once you learn these steps for optimizing artwork, they’ll become second nature to you, and you’ll be able to open files and maximize them for printing in 30 seconds or so.

Learn how to optimize artwork with these six, easy-to-follow steps.

During the course of 16 years creating artwork and separations for screen printing, apparel decorating businesses have witnessed plenty of changes — but none so transformative as the influx of digital direct-to-garment inkjet printers. The beauty of these machines is that setup times are a thing of the past; also, there are no films needed, no screens to burn, no messy emulsion. You just make your art file look good and print it. And there’s the key to using digital direct-to-garment printers — making your art file look good.

Some art files might seem fine when you first open them, but getting top quality inkjet prints on fabric can require quite a few adjustments in your graphics software. The good news is that once you learn these steps for optimizing artwork, they’ll become second nature to you, and you’ll be able to open files and maximize them for printing in 30 seconds or so.

Optimizing artwork requires some color correction, but not high-end, incredibly complex adjustments. I’m talking about simple corrections that help you make more money. In other words, the following suggestions aren’t academic, ivory tower suggestions. They’re real-world tips for real world printing.

DIVE INTO PHOTOSHOP

When you create a new file in Adobe Photoshop, you should create the art on a transparent layer. If you do, you’ll see a checkerboard pattern, which indicates that you have a transparent layer. Why layers? They allow you to edit one part of the design — the background, for instance — without affecting the others. In the Layers palette, the “eyeball” icon indicates whether a particular layer is viewable. By turning the eyeballs off and on, you can view the artwork file’s various combinations of layers.

Notice that the Marquee tool has a small triangle in the corner. Anytime you see that triangle on a tool, click and hold it to get a pop-up menu of other tool options. Notice that the Move tool doesn’t have the triangle, meaning there are no additional options for it.

When using the Paint Bucket and Gradient tools, you can click in the middle of a selection to fill it with the foreground color. You will always have a foreground and a background color selected, and you can switch between the two when using any tool by simply pressing “X” on your keyboard. Hit the “D” key to call up the default foreground and background colors: black and white. This is a handy keyboard shortcut to remember because, as your artwork’s color palette expands, you’ll want to be able to find black easily and quickly. Rather than repeatedly clicking to search for it, you can just press the “D” key.

When you select an area, you’ll see the famous “marching ants” that define the selection area. Pressing Command+0 in MacOS or Ctrl+0 in Windows zooms up a selection as large as it can fit on your monitor. If you were zoomed in on a selection and wanted to pull back out and see the entire thing, you can use your mouse to select View from the top menu and change the setting, or you can just type Cmd/Ctrl+0.

Photoshop offers a number of default brushes. Choose the soft airbrush by double clicking it, and paint inside your selection (the area with marching ants). You’re only painting inside the selected area, so you can create a highlight or shadow inside that selection without worrying about messing up other areas of the artwork.

Cmd/Ctrl+Z is the keyboard shortcut for Undo (otherwise available via mouse by pulling down the Edit menu and selecting Undo).You can use the History palette option to view the steps you’ve taken, and take back as many steps as you want. Photoshop defaults this setting to 20. If you change this setting and ask it to remember dozens more steps, you risk using too much RAM, which will slow down the computer; so don’t set it too high.

Cmd/Ctrl+D allows you to deselect your selection. Finally, notice that there’s a window on the right side of your screen with palettes for Channels, Layers, History, etc. all nested together. If you close any accidentally, reopen by using your mouse to select the Window pull-down from the top menu. Just select Layers or any other palette that has disappeared or that you want to add to the workspace.

One other point before diving in: If your digital direct-to-garment printer has white ink, your artwork should be on a black-and-white background, just as it would be for screen printing. If your printer doesn’t do white ink, then you probably don’t need to worry about that. However, most decorators either have a printer that uses white ink or plan to upgrade to one some time in the future.

MAIN ADJUSTMENTS

Open a stock photo that’s typical of the type of image that you might print on a garment. It may look pretty good, but you can probably make it look and print much better. First, select Image from the top menu and make sure the file is in RGB (not CMYK) mode. When you’re ready to print, you can convert it to CMYK, but I prefer to work in RGB because so many of the changes you’ll make depend on “eyeballing” the colors. Scans and digital photos will probably be sent to you as RGB files.

• STEP 1: From the top menu, select Image > Adjustments > Selective Color. A pop-up window will allow you to adjust your neutrals. From the Colors drop-down menu select Neutrals. Every image has gray information; I’m not talking about gray as its own color, in an image of an elephant for instance, but gray matter in the colors themselves.
  

Leave the Preview box checked, and type a “3” in the percentage boxes of each of the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black sliders. Click the Preview check box on and off to see the before and after. Have you taken out enough of the grays? If not, change the “3s” to “5s.” Every image is different, of course, but the point here is to get rid of some of the gray information.

• STEP 2: Next, go to Image > Adjustment > Hue/Saturation. (The keyboard shortcut is Cmd/Ctrl+U.) Grab the saturation slider, and saturate the image a bit, taking care not to overdo it. The default setting is 0, so just push it a bit until it looks good to you, and hit OK.

• STEP 3: Now select Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast. (It’s directly above the Hue/Saturation selection in the drop-down menu you just used in Step 2.) For this step, I use a setting of 5 every time, perhaps the only setting for which the same number can work every single time, regardless of the image. 68 Impressions

• STEP 4: Now go to Image >
  

Adjustments > Levels (keyboard shortcut: Cmd/Ctrl+L) to set your black and white points. You can visually see when you’ve set the black and white points by holding down the Option key in MacOS or Alt key in Windows. Holding that key down, grab and slide the black triangle on the Histogram to the right until you see a black “chunk” of color. The screen will probably look psychedelic, but you’re looking for the first chunk of solid black somewhere in that image. Now do the same thing to set a white point. Note that some images may not have a white point — images of a sunset, for example, where it’s all yellows and oranges. Look for the lighter parts of the image, such as the lemon yellow and reds, to give you a visual stopping point.

• STEP 5: Now that you’ve made the main adjustments to the image, you’re ready to sharpen it. You’ll want to do this for almost every image you get, simply because most of them will not be completely focused. Before you start sharpening, switch the image from RGB mode to Lab Color mode by selecting Image > Mode > Lab Color. If you sharpen the actual RGB color pixels, you could damage the file’s color information. When working with images in Lab mode, you will see a Lightness Channel in your Preview Channels window. This shows the tonal value of your image, giving you an accurate grayscale. In fact, it’s so accurate that if you ever want to print a grayscale only version, you can use this channel instead of converting from RGB mode to Grayscale mode.

• STEP 6: Open the Unsharp Mask dialog box by selecting Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask from the top menu. (“Unsharp” is a strange name, given that it is a tool you use to actually sharpen the image, nonetheless, that’s the name.) You’ll usually leave the default settings for Radius and Threshold, and use the Amount Slider to make adjustments.

If you over-sharpen, artwork pixilates and starts to look more like a texture and less like an image. Use your History palette to jump back if you have over-sharpened. When you’re happy with the image, click OK and convert the file back to RGB to see the finished image (File > Mode > RGB).

Want to see how much of a difference you’ve made to the artwork? From the top menu, select File > Revert and take a look (Cmd/Ctrl+Z un-reverts it). Comparing your quickly optimized version to the original should reveal a killer image that’s much better than what you started with — one that looks nice and bright, and will print much better.

These are the steps you should take every time: sharpen the image, bump the contrast and slightly oversaturate it on screen. Repeat these steps every time, and they’ll eventually become second nature.