A Colour Guide for Your Digital Colour Printing: How to Make a Colour Digital Print

Colour is extraordinary. The vibrancy and beauty we see in nature or even in our décor can affect our perspective, emotions, and influence us. That is why colours play such an important role in the marketing of design, fashion and interiors. Here, we discuss digitally printed fabric products and explain how fabric design can be affected. 

We have compiled some top tips for print-on-demand shade matching for digitally printing on fabrics. It will provide everything you need to know to create a perfect color match on your fabric and your pattern. We also explain about shade systems, how to prepare your files and how to achieve the closest match to any existing collections or desired colour. 

Understanding Different Colour Systems in Digital Printing

We know that you need perfect shades when you print items digitally. It makes no difference what industry you're in, whether it's fashion, interiors or you're creating an original item. You can easily achieve these using the Digital Fabric Print Process.

But first things first. Don’t expect the digital print to match your computer screen.

You’ve probably discovered the hard way that it doesn’t match. Computers, mobile phones, notebooks and other devices all display tints in the Red Green Blue (RGB) shade gamut. For this reason, it's essential you save your artwork in this large format when you print digitally.

Designers use the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key System (CMYK) for screen (lithographic or offset printing). This method is used for various media, including mixed media such as posters, banners, book and magazine pages, greeting cards, booklets with several pages, a table plan, business items for the office, business cards, greeting cards, single page leaflets or flyers, quality luxury stickers or stickers for house use, labels and more. People also use digital printers to screen-print on fabrics.

At maake, we calibrate our printers to quick view compare and match your screens. We use hex codes profiles in our printing service to get the best quality results. 

Whilst the Red Green Blue System (RGB) gives the largest shade space (extended shade gamut) for your screen, if you used only those inks – no black – you would get very disappointing results (which is why recommend you never do that). 

Instead, we suggest you use our physical Colour Atlas (colour chart/guide). It includes more than 2400 hex blocks, which ensures your file matches your textile print. 

Learn all about Digital Printing here.

Color Profile Digital Fabric Printing

A colour print profile is a way that a certain device (say a computer or a mobile phone) captures or displays colours on its screen.

This profile is how a device explains how it displays and prints hues for a digitally created print.

A camera captures the profile. When it appears on your screen, it will look exactly the way your fabric will look when it’s printed.

This is where the journey to a perfect match begins.

It all Starts with Calibration

This is the first step in the print service – once that’s begun, you’ll never look back!

Calibration is a specialist print process. It involves printing over 10,000 chips (Pantone spot colour) onto each fabric.

We scan these chips using a specialised tool called a Spectrophotometer.

The Spectophotometer sends a message to the printer software, providing details of what the shade should print like.

If you’d like to see the Spectrophotometer in action, watch this video!

With this information, the software ‘builds the colour space’. This involves creating the range of possible hues it can print on a fabric. You select a particular setting, and the software does the rest.

You can also alter the shades of ink you use for printing in percentages. This ensures high print quality. Our print team are experts in this specialised skill, which is why we always get such great results!

This print method involves reproducing the closest possible match to your screen for high photo quality.

Matching Screen Shades to Fabric Bases

When you're digital printing on textiles, it’s hard to know whether your result will match your artwork. This is why shade gamut ink is so important for printing. It helps to create the closest match possible for quality results.

 Hopefully, you’ll be happy with the shade match and can see the design come to life. However, if you want to get an exact match, it’s important to use sampling, to see what a sample of your fabric will look like when it’s printed on. This is why we created our Sample Book.

If you like, you can first use our handy Colour Atlas to achieve the perfect colour match. It doesn’t cost a lot and is an excellent shade matcher.  

Let’s say you’re creating a piece of custom fabric that needs the print to match other textiles or items that you currently own. maake’s professional quality printing services ensure a close match for your products. All you need to do is use the specific guide.

Pantone offers an excellent shade matching service. The Pantone Colour Chart provides a list of basic colours for artists, designers, printers, manufacturers, marketers, and clients in a variety of industries. Other guides are available, at a cost; these offer accurate colours and colour combinations. 

Remember: If you are printing on fabric with maake, we cannot guarantee a perfect match to any colour system except when you match to our Colour Atlas.

Create the Perfect Colour Digital Print

Fabrics all have different bases, textures and finishes, and printing them involves a variety of different inks to create a print. 

All computer screens have different brightness and shade strengths (for example, some are warmer, some are cooler or more blue).  So it’s important that you not only match the hue to your screen if you want excellent accuracy.

Textiles can have different base hues (beige/white). When you order your atlas you need to pick the fabric you intend to use. It’s also advisable to get a maake Colour Sample Book, which includes all the fabric bases we use, so that you will be able to get an idea of what your choice of fabric will look like when you print on it.

Remember: different bases display the colors in a slightly different shade, depending on the fabric composition, thus only the correct base can show you a realistic representation. 

Once you find the right base then you can use the hex code. Rest assured, it will look just as you envisioned it. Learn how to use the printed maake Colour Atlas here.

Colour Digital Print Suggestions

All About RGB

RGB shades are made from the three primary shades: blue, green and red.  These are the colours you view on your computer screen when you create a fabric design or a collection of patterns to print on fabrics.  We can also combine red, green and blue (RGB) shades to create other shades to use on fabrics.

We profile most of our fabric to print as closely as possible to your design. But there will always be variations between different fabric bases – whether you choose linen fabric, rayon fabric, or another fabric of your choice.

What To Do Using RGB

• • Set your file with a standard Red, Green, Blue (RGB) profile, extended gamut.
  • Order a sample of the fabric you want to use for your project, if you need an exact colour match to ensure a perfect match.
  • If you have our Colour Atlas, you can use the codes on it to match the RGB (red/green/blue) shades in your software. Ensure you create your fabric design before you drop those three shades in.
    
  • Drop them to:

  Image Mode: RGB / 8 Bits per channel
  - Image Profile: sRGB IEC61966-2.1.

  • If y ou are using Photoshop, you can use the shade dropper tool to select the fabric shade you want and drop it into the file.
  • Get in touch ith our team if you need help – we have a full artwork studio to help you create original design, colour manage print or tweak and re-colour existing artwork and PDFs. Please contact our art working team at: studio@maake.com or call us on 02036955442.

What to Do Using hex Codes

·       Hex shade codes are one type of HyperText Markup Language shade codes that you’ll often hear referred to as 'hexadecimal shade' or 'hex for fabric' or 'paper shades'.

·       The reason to use hexadecimal numbers is that they are a human-friendly representation of values in binary code. 

·       Hex shade codes start with a hashtag (#). We then add 6 letters and/or numbers to follow this hashtag. The first 2 letters/numbers refer to red, the next 2 refer to green, and the last 2 refer to blue. Those relate to the red, green and blue (RGB) shades.

·       If you use Photoshop, you should be able to enter the 6 Digit ‘Hex Code’ -eg 6688FF into the Photoshop shade picker/dropper section beginning with #.

What Not to Do

· Design and submit your files in the CMYK right colour format (cyan, magenta, yellow and key).

· Match to screen for fabric printing – always match to a print sample where possible to avoid disappointment. Use the screen only as a guide, not a guarantee, not even if it’s a calibrated screen.

Let Us Assist You With Colour Printing

Please contact us if you need assistance. We offer all the solutions and every service you need.

We have a full art printing studio on hand with every modern service to help you create original designs for your business, manage printing or tweak and recolour existing artwork.

Please get in touch with our art working team at: studio@maake.com or call us on 02036955442

Whether your business is in fashion, interiors or you are putting together your own business project, perfect hues are essential. You can easily achieve this with this particular fabric print process and our fast turnaround.