Perception V/S Reality

One of the things to keep in mind when creating prints digitally is the fact that the digital colours always seem better and brighter than the true colours, i.e the colours when the fabric is printed. This could be because when creating the file the brightness on your device was too low but in most cases its purely because the pantones don’t match. Pantone referencing is extremely important in the design industry to get the best results.

Every file we create must be in RGB colour format and at 300 DPI. The best way to check colours is to double click the colour and check the numbers next to red, green and blue. The most efficient way to change colours without changing each object separately is to select and group the objects and then mess around on Illustartor (Ai) by going to Edit-Edit Colours- Adjust Colour Balance. Always remember to record the numbers changed. -5 and +5 on any of the values creates a big difference. Apart from colour balance we can go to Edit- Edit Colours- Saturation. The percentage of saturation need to be recorded for this as well.

On photoshop the best way to adjust colours is to go to Image- Adjustments- Hue and Saturation. Or another neat way to quickly change the colours is to play around with the curves.

What we’ve been doing so far is getting the first version of the file printed on the sample fabric (In this case crepe). We already have the pantone references printed on the same fabric to get an accurate version of the colour. This is because even if we use the eyedropper tool (I) and pick a pantone it still looks different when it’s printed on real fabric.

We then compare the shades and replace the colours on the digital file and send it to get re-printed. So far this has been working best. It’s a shame that the true colours don’t always end up like the computer files.

It’s all about trial and error and finding out what looks best.