mug colour test - a must have

[mrs maggot]

one of the members on here suggested printing a test mug, with corel, i drew and coloured in a set of ovals just to see what colours i get vs, what i see on screen, i used some basic CMYK colours, blue, red, green, pink, yellow, cyan, black, orange

now from this i can see, that my printer sx515 is doing a good job, and if i stick to those colours i should be fine.

sorry i cant remember the name of whoever suggested it, but i think every home should have one - thank you

should point out its printed on a real xpres cheapie as i did not want to waste a good mug lol, but i quite like it now, so might do some more on BMS mugs

[John G]

Do Xpres do cheap mugs?

[AdamB]

.........sorry i cant remember the name of whoever suggested it, but i think every home should have one - thank you

you're welcome Laura.

I have a mug with colours, a piece of metal and a placemat - just to keep an eye on things.

It's good to get what you actually want so doing it this way you know what you'll end up with, no matter what the colour is on screen (as long as you don't change profiles between prints).

[Andrew]

We use a mug per each main colour with all different shades - blues, reds, greens etc. We also print these with the correspong pantone ref so we know which one is needed to get a near pantone match.

[JSR]

I'm not sure I understand the benefit of having a mug with spot colours printed on it. If you have an accurate profile, what do you gain?

[Andrew]

I'm not sure I understand the benefit of having a mug with spot colours printed on it. If you have an accurate profile, what do you gain?

You must be lucky with that "If". I've never known any of the sawgrass profiles to be spot on with colours and always slight variants. We've done some of our own where needs be but some colours like green can sill be some way off. Also, you would need to calibrate a screen which you are viewing on.

Do you get your profile spot on then with what ever you see is what prints out? I know Paul likes his profiles as well. If you guys are getting it working like that then I'll have to get some tips. If someone asks for a design with a certain pantone is that straightforward for your profile?

[JSR]

The only "tip" I can offer is to get your own profiles done. Profiles can be done on a "per-image" basis for more accuracy if you're trying to match specific colours.

I agree with you about the ones provided by Sawgrass. The best they can be described as is "close enough if you're lucky". I daren't count how much wasteage I had with wrong colours when I believed that "supported by Sawgrass profile" was all there was to it. Providing a single profile and expecting it to produce good results for everyone's entry-level printer is narrow-minded thinking at best. I've never been able to offer colour-matching with Sawgrass' profile.

Having used Paul's profiling device a couple of months back, I'm now desperately trying to save up enough funds to get my own one. It's the only real solution.

[John G]

You're never going to get acurate pantone colour matches with sublimation printing - all it takes is 10 seconds under/over and the item will be a different shade of the colour required.

[Andrew]

I personally don't know that much about profiles. I have someone here who tweaks the available ones but don't think we have made one from scratch. Guess we are missing a trick on that. Don't know if profiling per design is cost effective? Does it take long?

Have there been previous discussions on this profiling device of Paul's? I've heard it mentioned a few times. How much is it? I'll do a search when I get a chance for threads where it might have been discussed previously.

[Andrew]

You're never going to get acurate pantone colour matches with sublimation printing - all it takes is 10 seconds under/over and the item will be a different shade of the colour required.

We often get asked to Pantone match and haven't had a sinle complaint with the results as of yet. We have taken over 10 mugs in some cases to get it spot on. One problem though is the substrate you print on as the white gloss mug will lift the colour more due to the transparency of the ink.

I did recently get a mug screenprinted with a bright yellow onto a dark mug. This was way off and a credit had to be done for the customer. With sublimation we then got it just about spot on. The customer just had to make do with a white handle area.