If your design doesn’t fill the required size, say 10 x 10 for a T-shirt and your design is approximately 10 inches tall but less than 10 inches wide, do you crop off the excess blank space on the sides? Or is that extra space needed for Café Press to get the image centered properly on the T-shirt? What if your image fits the width but isn’t as tall. Do you position it towards the top of the 10 x 10 area and leave the bottom area still on or do you crop that excess bottom area off?

If you make an image with a white background will it show a white box on the item samples of light colored shirts? (I’m not sure I can make the background transparent) I think I read here that it doesn’t print a white box on the actual T-shirt, but I wondered if it showed on the samples in the shop.

I have Adobe Photo Deluxe Home Edition 3.0. I’m unsure, but I don’t think it’s in CMYK mode. I think it’s RGB. (The color balance has Cyan Megenta Yellow on one side of a slider bar and Red Green Blue on the other side. There is also a color picker with swatches and another box with a rainbow of available colors) There doesn’t appear to be a way to select a color mode. Can I get by using this for Café Press designs? What I want to do is scan hand drawn black and white line art and then add color. If the color mode is going to be a problem, I may just do black and white designs for now. Maybe I can use shades of gray?

Thanks for any info you can give me!

if you image is 10x8 and cafepress allows 10x10 cafepress will place your image 10 inches wide and center it on the other direction....they do not print where there is no image so there is nothing to fill

If possible, try to work on a transparent background. Whatever color you leave as a background will show up on the t-shirts, but white ink will not print on light products.

Many people design in RGB color and some come back to say how the bright colors appeared dulle than in the preview. Tanith suggests that you work in CMYK so that it's closer to the actual shade of color when printed. In Photoshop, you can switch from RGB to CMYK by going to Image then Mode at the top.

Lots of people must work in RGB because their application does not support designing in CMYK. You can use a CMYK color picker or just be aware of the shifting.

If you design with a white background your images will not look good on dark apparel. There is no white printed on light apparel so a white background is OK for them.

It is your choice how to work with images. For apparel you can create a square canvas and then size and place your image inside that. Be sure to work in pixels, not inches. If your canvas is only 2000 pixels square you will not be using full size on the apparel that allows a 12 inch square image area.
http://tutortanith.com/#imagesize

Thank you everyone, for your replies!

Tanith, I took a look at your tutorial pages and found the color pickers from these two links here:

http://tutortanith.com/charts/rgb2cmyk.htm

http://tutortanith.com/charts/cmykpicker.htm

Are you saying we can save any of those three color pickers to our computers and then open them in our graphics program and use the eyedropper/cross-hair tool on your color pickers to get correct CMYK colors? If so, that would be great and take a lot of guesswork out of designing in RGB.

I’m still a little unsure about some things. When we use the dimensions for the design area… say 12 x 12 (3600 x 3600 pixels?) are we supposed to submit it to Café Press at that exact size even if the design doesn’t completely fill in one direction? We shouldn’t crop off the excess white space, correct?

I understand that on light colored T-shirts a white box background won’t be printed on the T-shirt (only on a dark T-shirt it will be a white box if the background isn’t transparent) what I was wondering is, if the background is white will a white box show on the light colored T-shirts in the samples shown in the shops?

quote:

Are you saying we can save any of those three color pickers to our computers and then open them in our graphics program and use the eyedropper/cross-hair tool on your color pickers to get correct CMYK colors? If so, that would be great and take a lot of guesswork out of designing in RGB.

Yup, absolutely.

You will get the most control over your image placement and sizing if you use a full size canvas even if the image does not fill the canvas. You will get the most flexibility in using the image on various things if you crop closely.

The big thing to know is that the CP system will always apply the image at the largest allowed size when the product has no existing image. If you prefer a less than full sized image you can either use the full canvas but smaller image method or use the cropped method, resize manually, and then use a template section for the future.

http://www.tutortanith.com/sho...htm#templatesections