Index Printing Tips
Rule

Index Color separations use a stochastic dot pattern. Each color is butt registered. In other words, it is a spot color with no one color overprinting another color.  Perfect registration is essential to achieving the finest quality and sharpness. If dot gain or misregistration occurs, colors will not match, resulting in fuzzy looking prints.

A) White underlays should be ran on fine mesh (230-305). The print should  be thick enough to bridge the weave of the tee but not thick enough to be opaque. You will be assured a soft hand even on black tees if a fine mesh is used.

B) Use fine mesh screens 210-305 for best quality (metal screen frames are best). Use hard, sharp squeegees and stand them almost straight up. Your first prints should be light, then darken as the print run progresses. You are trying to get your prints to match the films exactly with little or no dot gain.  

C) You can rearrange the print order to suit your needs but generally dark colors and colors of greatest coverage should be printed first to help avoid problems with dot gain.

D) We attempt to give you everything you need to print dark and light garments. Depending on the garment colors, you may chose to strip some films together to reduce the number of colors printed or choose not to print a flash or top white. If you find yourself in a situation where you may need some film variant not provided, please call. We maintain disk files of all separations produced and can provide what you need very quickly.

E) PMS colors provided are pulled from our color comp and at best may only be close. They are a starting point only. By far the best way to match colors is at press time, start with the sample swatchs that we provide and then adjust the colors to match the original customer provided comp.

F) Sharp Squeegies, capillary films and a loop for registration can only help.

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