As many successful print shop owners have learned, adding the hottest special effects to your product offerings allows you to add sizzle to your sales. We all strive to set ourselves apart from ordinary apparel decorators, and that's why we reach into our bag of special-effect tricks. Plus, screen printers have resources and tools at their disposal that decorators using other processes don't, enabling them to add that extra something that can win the order. 

Is your shop experiencing one too many errors when printing? Or maybe it's just your worst fear. Try these four tips for avoiding the ever-dreaded misprint.

At a time that many high-end garment printers were struggling to produce realistic images in CMYK, an artist took an entirely different approach that would eventually take the industry by storm.

Innovators, engineers, and tinkerers have been searching for a way to accelerate the screen making process for decades. For every printer, from the artist who burned her screens in the sun to the multimillion-dollar retail graphics provider with 18-foot screens, traditional prepress was an arduous and expensive parade.
Of course, before the advent of digital artwork and computerized film production, this parade stretched on even longer. “Everything took an amazing amount of time,” says Richard Greaves, an industry veteran and consultant. “A full-color set of separations cost $800 to $1000 and took a week to produce. And sometimes they worked; sometimes they didn’t.”
As innovations like PostScript, PageMaker, and eventually Illustrator and Photoshop enabled and simplified digital art creation, companies began exploring ways to leverage this in the screen making workflow. The first hurdle was getting output with a sufficiently dense black. Laser printer manufacturers like Qume, and then Xante, developed a way to lay down a thicker deposit of toner onto rough, vellum-finished paper; soon, early inkjet manufacturers took notice of the “film issue” and found a way to lay down more ink, too. Integrated digital imagesetting systems like the Autotype Aspect gained strong footholds.

For most screen printers, there is minimal heating or cooling inside their shops. This leads to seasonal temperature fluctuation that printers, and their equipment, must deal with.

When talking about a ghost image, the actual cause of the discoloring is due to the deterioration of one of the dyes in the fabric. This most often happens from the pigment degradation of yellow dyes. This creates discoloration in the form of blemishing a light green shirt into a blue ghost image. This is true with other colors as well. To test a garment for discoloration, follow these five steps:

Direct-to-garment (DTG) printing is on the cutting edge of garment decoration and easily can become the foundation for successful business with just a single printer. The process is fun, exciting, cool and creative, but a successful business is all about the money. This means you must know how to appropriately charge for your services.

The beginning of a new year is always fun to me. It represents a clean slate, a fresh start, and another opportunity to define goals and develop a plan on how I intend to make them happen. These are all good things because I can be a procrastinator and a pile-maker extraordinaire at times. Here are the top five things that I do to set the stage for creating my best year yet:

Direct-to-substrate technology raises a lot of questions. Joe Abreu of The M&R Companies takes questions from Printwear's publisher Stacy Marshall to clear some of the air.

The final stages in screen making are washout, drying and finishing. Even though these are relatively straightforward processes, there are still a number of key factors that you need to get right in order to produce a good screen.