Linux and Dye Sub - is it difficult?

[Paul]

Very low quLity screen grabsc cant see much on my phone

[rossdv8]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]1909[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]1910[/ATTACH] Sorry Paul, computer automatically saves a web image as well. Sent wrong ones.

[Paul]

Still blured it may be my phone then

[rossdv8]

Printer driver settings
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[rossdv8]

Paul, the forum is reducing the images to thumbnails. It is about midnight here. I'll upload the pics to one of my web sites tomorrow and post the link here. There's no panic. I have a batch of mugs to print but I will try to do the upload first thing.
Thanks for your questions and help.

[Paul]

sorry mate. they are as small as post stamps
iam sure there is an option there that will let you upload full size

[rossdv8]

Paul, I can;t find an option that lets me upload higher resolution on this forum, so I sent you a PM with a link.
It is strange because I am sure I uploaded previously once, maybe twice. Maybe I didn't.
Anyway, you can see the effects on gamut on the print simulation pics as I swap ICC profiles. One of the Brother Dye Sub profiles gives no out of gamut warning on a lot of images. Almost every other profile just splashes red everywhere across the screen. Some are worse than others, but it is interesting to see.
It is also interesting that printing without profiles gives sharp clear images. printing with a profile looks like someone smeared mud across the substrate. Curious.
I'll play around with brightness and contrast on the Brother Dye Sub profile that gives no OOG warnign and see what happens there, but I would really like to compare the difference printing with a personalised profile and printing via printer settings.
Thanks Paul for the time and suggestions.

[rossdv8]

Ok. I have just done a sizeable batch of mugs with natural and also with enhanced photo images. In all cases the mugs came out almost indistinguishable from the colours on my monitors. If I change the image in GIMP, save it and print it, what I see on screen is exacty what I get. All this with no colour management profiles.
It was good before, but a few very small changes to the printer settings and it is amazing now. Turns out I was making numerical changes of '5' or '10' in the printer adjustments and it wasn't bad.
Once I began fine tuning with setting adjustments of 4, 3, 2 and 1 things got so much better I can't believe what I am seeing now.

So - anyone trying this with Linux and no profiles, download a good industry standard colour test image in high res.. Start with my earlier suggestions.

A lot will depend on the ink and paper settings. Choose Plain Paper setting. Quality can be intersting. Try a few different settings like Plain Normal, High, Photo, best. See what gives a nice result.

Try increasing the printer driver's brightness and then incresase contrast by half as much as you increased the brightness.

Then find the settings for Red, Green, Blue. I found Decreasing Red most, Decreasing Green by a lesser amount and increasing Blue a bit worked best from the outset. But as I said, the real discovery was that making SMALL adjustments lead to the best result.

My blacks appear jet black, grey really is. Red is still a tiny bit more orange than I would likein logos, but most of my work is photographs and even skin tones are looking great.

[rossdv8]

Update on Sublimating with Linux. If it works, there should be a copy of the original photograph, a copy of a design using that photo sublimated on a 100% cotton tee (after 1 wash), and a picture with 2 shirts, printed about the same day, the LEFT is the 100% cotton tee after half a dozen hot washes (after being worn exercising and soaked with sweat before each wash) and the RIGHT one is a 100% polyester shirt with a sunrise photo.

I added a pic with another 2 shirts. Left is a scene printed A4 size on JetPro SS in Jan or Feb 2013, and worn and washed maybe 30 times. Right (Orange colour) is a sunset pic sublimated into 100% cotton in 2013 and worn and machine washed at least twice most weeks.

All prints are still done with Linux and no ICC profiles - so while not ideal, it can be done.
I know a lot of people have issues with sublimation into 100% cotton, but with a little practice, it can be done and with new pricing of the pre-treatment, it is now viable, especially when we treat 10 shirts at one time and dry them.
That is the only time consuming part of the operation. The rest is exactly the same as any normal dye sub job.
The hard part of this whole experiment, was working out how to stop the pre-treatment washing out in hot water, and inventing a way for it to combine 'into' the cotton fibres.

Looking at the subbed cotton, polyester and heat transfer prints side by side in this post, I can't see any problem with dull colours compared to sub on polyester or heat transfers. There is a difference in brightness between the brightness of the photos as they appear on screen and on garments, but that is not the fault of Linux.
Leaving the brightness, the colours are ok.

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[rossdv8]

Still printing Dye Sub with Linux and now doing some direct from the Android Tablets. I've set things so what I see on the screen is consistently pretty close to what I get on the shirt/mug etc. The shirts come out with the colours a little lighter and brighter and the mugs are maybe a little darker, but overall it is ok.

The Windows and Mac users have this covered because there are ICC profiles for their printers, paper and Substrates. I've spent over a year messing with this and discovered if I use the GIMP graphics program and with the ink I have at the moment, on quality high release paper I generally get away with:

Colours > Saturation up 40. (I need 'tourist brochure' colours
Colours > Curves Then move the bottom left of the diagonal line to the right about HALF a space, then move the centre of the curve diagonally up/left about a space.

That gives me the results in this example. I can tweak it a little, but not too much.

The top pic is the design as it appears on screen with those adjustments.
The shirt shows the colours pretty close, but a little brighter than the original due to the saturation..
The bottom you can see part of the same image printed on my pigment printer.

Notice in the original and on the shirt, the cloudy sky, the blue sky and the sunburned skin on the tourists.
In the original and the shirt the colours are close, but on the pigment print on paper, there is almost no dark in the clouds and the sky is washed out. And the sunburn is almost missing from the skin.

So the Sublimation job almost replicates the original and the paper print on the pigment printer is off considerably.

The settings are saved in GIMP as presets and applied with a single click. Black text is 'jet black' on the shirts - no muddy colours.

Hope this adds to the archive of Linux stuff for those of us who use this system.
It takes only s few clicks to set this up in GIMP. I don't do a lot of solid colour work, but I did print Paul's DSF template on mugs and polyester, at a lower saturation and got pretty accurate reds, greys and blacks.[ATTACH=CONFIG]2619[/ATTACH]