Photos on mugs

[rossdv8]

After you've done a few you start to become very critical of your own work. Compare the image from the mug to the image as you see it on screen.
Ideally, if your settings and profiles are correct, the image on the mug will look exactly as it does on the screen. Same colours for grass, skin, sky etc. Same amount of blues and whites etc in the sky. That's what your icc colour profiles do. They match your screen to your mug or whatever else you print.
When you have that happening, you can use an image program to get the skin tones right on the screen, knowing when you print a mug it will be exactly as you see it.
Keep your first mug, and keep a few as you notice results you really like. I wrote the heat press settings on the bottom of my early mugs because I was testing the different results. I am so glad now that I did.
The temps I use, and the temps recommended in the heat press manual are different. Even changing mug brands makes a difference for me.

[Paul]

... And i will open pandora box now...



You can't match your colours with screen!

[rossdv8]

Ideally, if your settings and profiles are correct, the image on the mug will look exactly as it does on the screen

Paul is right, because the 'ideal' is not really achievable other than iin theory. But you can get very close.
The point I am trying to make is that with colour profiles you should ba able to get very close to printing what you see on the screen.
Keeping it simple, most of us are fairly happy when we print an image with an ordinary inkjet printer.
Print your image on an ordinary inkjet printer at a good setting on good paper. Does it look good? Does it look more or less the same on paper as it does on screen?
That is how it should look on your mug.
I think what Paul is trying to warn about is that your printer simply isn't capable of printing all the colours you see on the screen. But using profiles it will be pretty close.

[Paul]

This is exactly whay i mean

also substrats has all sorts of white base to print on. Screen has not. It has backlight and i can not be mached.
But as hou say you can get very close to the screen by using correct icc profiles and calibrating screen etc.

[socialgiraffe]

Plus a screen is RGB format, the printer is CMYK (or more).

[Paul]

.. but print is in RGB mode

[socialgiraffe]

. but print is in RGB mode

From CMYK inks

[daviddeer]

[url="http://www.webstir.com/color_management ... inter.html]This page [/url]will help you find out if you have a cmyk or rgb desktop printer. Generally desktop printer drivers convert the data to rgb before printing despite having 4 or more inks. Many Laser and postscript as well as commercial offset litho machines can handle cmyk data . As a practical matter, you have to consider desktop printers as RGB devices. Even fairly cheap 4-color inkjets have a wider gamut than a 4-color offset press, and if you send CMYK data (limited gamut) to a desktop printer, it's going to be converted back into a (now limited) RGB anyway for the printer to work with. It's counter-intuitive. Yes there are 4 inks and they're C, M, Y and K, but if you treat them as CMYK devices (a common misconception) you're working against the technology rather than with it.

You can't match your colours with screen!

I quite agree. Having worked for many years with colour management I can say that you get a very close approximation so you can do some soft proof tweaking to get an acceptable result. Many printers do not have the gamut to reproduce the full range of colours displayed on your monitor (many monitors cannot display the full gamut either). Bringing the file into gamut will reduce the colour shift but limits the tonal range. You just have to develop a "printers eye" and know your machine to get more accurate results.

[RogerC]

... And i will open pandora box now...



You can't match your colours with screen!

So true........though, just throwing this into the mix..............could it be possible to calibrate your screen to match the printer profile? If so then the only difference would be down to the substrate.

[rossdv8]

could it be possible to calibrate your screen to match the printer profile? If so then the only difference would be down to the substrate.

I don't have the luxury of using icc profiles, so the above is pretty well what I have done.

1. Adjusted my LCD monitors to almost match the LCD screens on my cameras.
2. Adjusted settings on my Dye Sub printer that make prints almost matching my screens.
3. Did the same for my Pigment printers.
4. Unfortunately, the wild card is my laser printer, which has a mind of its own when it comes to colours. To solve this problem all my designs are output as jpeg or png files. I open them in GIMP and apply a different preset depending whether I plan to print a mug, shirt, mouse pad etc. That solves the substrate differences.

With the main preset, the laser then prints almost exactly what is on my screen and matches mugs - my main product.
I know my shirts and mouse pads will have different brightness levels and the other presets will approximate those, but at least the colours will be very close to my screen.

It is NOT ideal but it is as good as I can get, and works for now. And, there is the advantage that it takes 2 minutes to get a proof printed.

The longest and most difficult job now is making the photos from my camera pretty.