Screen printing is without doubt the most common method of garment decoration. Unlike digital printing methods like direct-to-garment and sublimation printing, screen printers (direct and heat transfer) can only print one color at a time. So, in order to print artwork that contains more than one color, screen printers must be able to separate the colors in order to print them individually. High resolution (300 DPI) bitmap images can be used, but because they are composed of many tiny dots, selecting colors is much more difficult, especially with gradient colors. However, separating colors is a much easier process when working with a vector images and a program like CorelDraw.
In CorelDraw the main way of separating colors is through using the “Find & Replace Tool.” The Find & Replace Tool allows artwork to be separated through CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black) replacement. To perform the CMYK replacement separations, a piece of artwork can be no more than four colors. This is because each color is separated and replaced with 100% C, M, Y, or K. If the artwork is more than 4 colors, you can send it to us to have our artists separate the colors for a small fee.
