Printing photographs on t-shirts is one of the hardest jobs a screen printer can take on. Since screen printing is based on spot colors, or singular color inks, images that consist of thousands of colors such as photographs must be accomplished with four color process. Four color process for t-shirt printing is a way to separate the thousands of colors in a photograph into four single spot colors known as CMYK. The C stands for Cyan, the M is for Magenta, the Y is for yellow and the K is for key or black. These four colors run on four different screens and come together to look similar to the original photograph.

But as most customers tell us….just looking similar isn’t going to cut it. One of the best suggestions we can make to get the theme or concept across in the print is to convert that photograph or image as an animation. Here is a great example of a photograph that one of our customers wanted printed on black t shirts.

Here is the real image converted to a more animated image for print consisting of five spot colors.

These shirts came out great and our customer was extremely happy with them. They were very pleased that we made that suggestion and informed them of their alternatives instead of printing an image they wouldn’t have been happy with.