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My $0 CMYK conversion trick beat a $50 plugin for t-shirt green
Last month I was pulling my hair out trying to match this lime green for a client's brand on 40 shirts. I paid $50 for one of those fancy color conversion plugins and it still gave me a pukey olive mess. Then I spent a night messing around in Photoshop, manually checking my ink percentages against a Pantone swatch book from the local print shop in Akron. The plugin did the math but ignored how my specific ink brand lays down on 100% cotton. Doing it by hand with a 10x loupe and printing test patches on the actual shirt fabric got me within one shade after 3 tries. The plugin gave me a generic formula, but my own notes on overprint and dot gain were way more precise. Has anyone else found that manual calibration beats the paid tools for neon shades, or am I just unlucky with software?
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the_aaron11d ago
Wait, did you try printing test patches while also drinking a pot of coffee and squinting at Pantone chips under a $10 desk lamp from Target?
Because that's the only way I got my "mint green" to stop looking like swamp water on a hoodie.
My test prints looked like abstract art for a week straight, but yeah, manual beats software every time for the weird stuff.
The plugins are fine for CMYK basics, but they never account for your ink actually soaking into the fabric like a sponge, not a sheet of paper.
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