Zazzle has two basic kinds of t-shirt artwork: one for light t-shirts and one for dark t-shirts. Who cares? What difference does it make?
It turns out that it makes a lot of difference. Zazzle uses a different transfer technology for the two kinds of shirt. The artwork on a light T-shirt is basically an ink transfer: the area of the shirt with the artwork is just as soft and breathable as the rest of the shirt.
That's good, right? Well, yes, it is. But the images on a light t-shirt aren't opaque. The base color of the shirt shows through. So if you have a picture of white fluffy clouds and put it on a yellow shirt, you get yellow fluffy clouds. Yipe!
Here's an example of how Beth McBeth looks on a light green T-shirt:
Even Beth finds that is ain't easy being green. For light T-shirt transfers, white and almost-white colors are your friend.
On a white shirt, the bleed-through can be used to your advantage. Because "white" means "transparent" on a light T-shirt, any picture with a white background behaves as if you'd done the laborious task of masking out the background and marking it as "transparent" in your photo-editing software. Many people don't know how to do this. If you use a white background and white T-shirts, you don't have to learn.
Zazzle's dark T-shirts use an opaque, rubbery transfer that allows you to put down a brilliant white wherever you want, including having white on a black T-shirt. All you goths out there need this! I haven't done a side-by-side test, but I suspect that the colors on a dark T-shirt are brighter, too. But the area with the transfer isn't soft and breathable the way it is on a light T-shirt.
On a dark T-shirt, Zazzle has a checkbox to let you pick whether "white" means "transparent" or "opaque white." Quite a difference! This allows you to take your image file with its white background and have the background go transparent on the shirt. Here's an example with transparent white on a brown shirt:
Ouch! Nasty! Big chunks of the image that we wanted to be opaque went transparent!
Okay, how about opaque white?
No ... I don't think so.
So what you really want is an image that has the background marked explicitly as "transparent." Zazzle will honor this. Transparency is supported by the GIF and PNG formats. The kind of image software that comes free with your camera or scanner probably doesn't let you do this, but if your software can handle it, it lets you do masking that works very well. Here's Beth on a dark brown shirt:
That's more like it!
Once you have masking and transparency working properly, dark T-shirts are a very flexible medium.
Happy masking!
Friday, August 7, 2009
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