Linux and Dye Sub - is it difficult?

[rossdv8]

Hi all,

I'm a new member and am having a ball setting up my printing and particularly the Dye Sub part. I had a cow of a time initially because I had been told I 'absolutely must' have an Epson or Ricoh printer and use ICC profiles, which will only work with Windows or Mac.

This thread is simply to let people starting in Dye Sub know it is possible to work exclusively in Linux and use free software for everything.
However, it will take some experimenting. You will waste some material. I found cheap 100% polyester cotton bed sheets and a pair of scissors to be invaluable.

Then I started on mugs. Hmmm. No real option there although I do sometimes test the press with a mug wrapped in a piece of polyester bed sheet. Doesn't work for polysub mugs though, but it does get colours close - cheaply.

I posted some info on initial settings HERE for anyone game to experiment. If you have a reasonable computer that already dual boots Mint, Ubuntu or Zorin you have pretty well everything you need.

Libre Office Draw for layout and final colour adjustment and tweaks. (Once you get a perfect print you save it with the appropriate name).
GIMP for initial colour edit and print corrections
Inkscape or Xara LX Xtreme for vector graphics.

I hope this is as much help to someone as the rest of the forum has been to me.

[s31teg]

I originally started on MAC but its so much easier just running on windows

All the time i spend making the systems works with MAC i could have be doing something more productive $$

[rossdv8]

I can understand that It took almost a week to print the shirts in that link. I wasted 8 or 10 shirts before I thought of the poly sheets. I wish I thought of that before I found the solutions. But shirts were $4 and $5 each at the local retail store.

At least I don't have all the hassles of Windows and Mac.

[Paul]

Hassle of a mac???
took me 30min to set all up and was ready to go. So if anyone is sayng sublimation printing with correct colours on linux is easier then mac or win must be nuts. Once you got your software installed you are ready to go. Colour management in gimp is a joke. Interface is not to bad but faaaaar from perfect.

[rossdv8]

No Paul, not saying that. I read some posts where a few members believed it was not possible or difficult to use Linux. Just letting people know it can be done easily.
I should add however, that I imagine using Windows or Mac and ICC profiles should give much better results than those in my pictures.

[Paul]

I love to see some printed via linux.
and i don't think we can class it as a easy way. If there would be possibility to load icc to gimp and work on that then, yes. I would call it easy. But if colour setting have to be set in sliders, pressed on blank, adjust the sliders etc... Then no. I would not call it easy. Aim sure its doable but for longer run not suitable. As once you have adjusted sliders of each colour and got good prints then another print will need another adjustment as once you change one colour this will change another one and so on.

[mrs maggot]

Ross thanks for doing that as a write up, i know a few people who use free stuff and a couple of linux fans - its nice to know Mr Apple and Mr Microsoft have not received anything from you

[rossdv8]

Sorry Paul, this will be a long reply.

I apologise that the link I posted at the top of this thread takes you to the first post in another thread, rather than the link in my reply which I copied and pasted. Just a glitch in the forum.

Here's a link to my first week's photographs of experiments with shirts in LINUX. I was deciding if it was worth pursuing.. The first nine shirts ARE dye sub.
The last four shirts are NOT Dye Sub but it will be obvious which ones.
http://www.rossdevitt.com/whitsundays/shirts/

All these first week shirts are straight out of the printers with no colour adjustment except one.
Please bear in mind the bright orange one actually looks very much like that, it was taken at sunrise in a severe red dust storm. But I was looking for something very bright t wear and I opened it up a little with brightness and contrast. The others are as they came from the camera. I have since learned to adjust the colours.

I now know how to tweak CMY and RGB (same thing in GIMP) and as a starting point use c -15 m -20 and y -15 in GIMP then drag them into my output program. These shirts haven't had that done yet.

These days I routinely add little brightness and add 50% of the brightness in contrast. So, say Bright +20 Contrast +10. I do this in Libre Office Draw, which I use as my print output.

I also recently discovered GAMMA. I sometimes change the Gamma a little. Today's work needed gamma to be dropped from 1.00 to 0.60 on one job to make a logo match a sample.

I am lucky because I have two Brother 6510 printers, one with dye sub ink and one with pigment ink. I sometimes do a quick print on the pigment printer and compare the output with what I am getting from the dye sub.

The pigment printer is used mainly for printing onto canvas, so I always have something to compare my dye sub results with.

I'm printing for the tourists in a niche market, so I print my own photographs. That means I know not only what the original photo looks like, but what I 'want' the finished product to look like.

I'm not trying to win people away from Windows and Mac by the way. They are the industry standard and they have support available.
I am letting people who regularly use and want to play with Linux seriously, that it is easy to get retail results on a computer that will run for weeks at a time without being rebooted and a printers that (so far) can be left without printing for a couple of weeks at a time with no nozzle clogging. I have had to run a head clean on the dye sub machine three times since January and oddly enough it was during heavy workloads - not after 2 weeks when I was away.

[rossdv8]

I'll stop these replies before it annoys readers. Just like to say that I was a computer operator, then programmer and tech for and since the 1970's until I was forced to retire in 2006. Like someone else here I lived with cp/m, Digital Research DOS (not doctor dos) and xenix as well as other unixes right through the millenium bug excitement. My business went 100% Linux in 1998 when it suddenly became simple, and I could run all my accounting packages in it.

Hope the pictures give you an idea what is possible. When I learn how to use this new mug press and learn more about the difference between polymer and ceramic I will do a picture gallery of mugs. At present I only have about ten mixed.

[Paul]

. I'm not trying to win people away from Windows and Mac by the way. They are the industry standard and they have support available

not saying that. But iam not exactly technology challenged and i know some stuff about computers. I also tried linux and i must say it was the worst set up for sublimation i ever had. It was ubuntu btw... But having you on here i may try ubuntu again. As i am not the best with linux i experienced some driver problems. But iam sure you will be able to help sort it out