So I decide to print a t-shirt. I read their media requirements. They only accept RGB files. For printing ink on fabric.
I sigh deeply. I rest my head on my desk for a few minutes. [screams in CMYK]
I recover. I prepare my image. As I am printing on a black shirt, I ensure that all of the black areas are transparent in the PNG.
I receive the shirt.
The "transparent" areas have black ink printed upon on black fabric. With extremely visible borders.
This future is terrible.
(It was Printify.)
I have had many successes with transparent PNGs printing on black at zazzle.com
Also, you can see the image projected onto some bro as he turns left and right with his bro-leer.
there is a very stupid reason for this.
To maximize contrast, print on demand shirts are now typically printed on a white substrate rather than the shirt itself, and then the print is adhered to the shirt. The white iron on sticker thing has to be cut to a shape in order to look right.
They obviously didn’t do that. Most likely because the software is looking for white to cut the edge out and ignore the alpha channel, but “transparent” is usually rgba(0,0,0,0) so you get black.
I've primarily been a web design person. RGBs and stuff. Dunno much about print work.
So last year I thought about getting a custom shirt printed.
The company I looked into had a fairly extensive list of design considerations.
And I still was like "Aaah! But! But... But? But! But?! Uhhh... But?" while looking at it.
(To their credit, they did say "if you have a vector art source with transparency, you should submit a PDF" which was exactly what I was looking for and did make me hopeful that this might be doable eventually. Once my scatter-brain gets the artwork done.)
20 years ago, I worked for a company that created fabric banners using a direct inkjet tech. Our printers used 16 different colors of ink and could reproduce many more colors than cmyk and our RIP took RGB files as input, which broke my brain at first.
So I wonder if they're not printing in cmyk. Maybe they're printing in hexachrome?
But that black printing sounds so dumb. Does no one think or look before running the job?
> Does no one think or look before running the job?
When "the job" is a ~$30 print on demand automation, of course they don't.
As someone who worked in prepress for years, the malpractice aimed at chasing cost cutting and lower headcount is painful. I see plenty of things in merch and commercial printing that would have been business breaking 20 years ago,
I have not had occasion to use them lately, but the quality of prints at Printful were surprisingly higher than most other POD houses I tried. I have also had good interactions with their team as regards feedback on prepping the artwork for best results, so I'm pretty confident you could email them and ask about the transparent region for the blank you're choosing and I'm also pretty confident they would end up printing it they way you expected.