Linux and Dye Sub - is it difficult?

[rossdv8]

It can apparently be done with the Gutenprint drivers.
They used to be called 'Gimp-Print', and are designed with this flexibility in mind. However, there are lots of drivers for Brother MFC - Lasers, but not for the MFC- Inkjets. Just my luck. I like the MFC series. Rugged, robust, disposable (price) and one bulk refillable cartridge fits just about all models, and prints forever.

I've got the main images for my line test printed, and now I understand what I need, I just have to be more dedicated to logging results. So without ICC available it is a matter of living with folders for different substrates. Then dividing those folders into images that printed with the standard pre-sets and those that didn't.

The biggest challenge is logos, but I did one last night for a company where the red is a little too orange. The second print solved the problem and I saved the result. Wasted one quarter of a particular substrate, so cost about 30 cents plus a small quantity of ink.

Even using genuine brother ink I often have to make several prints before I'm happy, so I'll keep refining the production.

I wouldn't suggest anyone swap to Linux, but I still think if you are already a Linux user, Dye Sub can be done relatively easily for most jobs. At least to try it out. It won't be cheaper - in fact there is more work involved, so it is probably dearer.
If someone likes the process they will have say, a mug press and/or flat press. Then they can think about adding a cheap Windows computer dedicated to Dye Sub and buy a profile from their Sawgrass ink supplier, because they'll already have some ink and an account If they don't like the process, they can either go into ordinary heat transfer and sell their dye sub ink, of simply sell off the gear.

[rossdv8]

Just found another interesting Vector Graphics program to add to LINUX. It is called sk1 and has been around under various names as it has been developed. The interface is familiar once you look around a little. It is a lot like a very early Corel Draw or Illustrator, and works simlarly to Inkscape or XaraLX.

What it does though very simply, is converts the output to CMYK. Now I am not sure what effect sending CMYK will have on Dye Sub printing yet, but it had an immediate and interesting effect on the printout of photographs from my pigment printer.

I may be grasping at straws here, but I am looking for a way to easily and more accurately match say a logo colour by using a very simple set of adjustments at print time.

The idea of course, is to get around the lack of ICC profile ability in linux.

On that note. A week or so ago I did a short run of shirts for a local exhibition, using only the logos and blacks/greys from their website for all the images. It turned out fantastic. Maybe a tiny bit brighter than their official apparel, but they loved it. The blacks were black and the greys were grey. None of the muddy browns I was getting a couple of months ago. :biggrin:

Persistence is paying off. I didn't do much tweaking, just my CMY settings using the preset I worked out some time ago.

[rossdv8]

An Update for any Linux users trying to work this dye sub thing without icc profiles. I've finally got some of it sorted.
The problem of course is to get what you print on your substrate to look exactly as it does on your screen. So if you tweak a photograph or a logo, you should see the same colours and tones on the finished product.
I've been printing on mouse pads, polyester shirts, ceramic mugs, and lots of A4 pieces of polyester cut from bed sheets.
I print mostly photographs. I've started doing some logos, but mostly it is still photos.
I began tweaking the photos in GIMP then printing. Each bad image, I would tweak a little more and print again. I worked out that mostly the CMY settings needed adjustment, but what I was seeing on the screen rarely came out on the product.

So I changed the end I was working. I found 3 images. One that always prints nicely on the laser and ordinary inkjet, and one that prints nicely but has completely different tones and colours - and one that never prints nicely no matter what I do to it.

I adjusted Colors>Curves in GIMP so each picture looked nice on screen and saved each of them.
Then I placed each original down the left of the page and each GIMPed pic down the right of the page.
I printed the page and got the usual disappointing images on the originals and the GIMPeed ones were a little different.

Next I turned ADVANCED settings on in print and changed Red, Green and Blue to the same as I use in GIMP for CMY. The GIMPed pictures were better, but the surprise was in the original unchanged pictures, They were closer to how they looked on screen. I printed another 10 pages witrh varying settings for Red Green and Blue, each annotated with the settings.

I was getting close - but no banana for the monkey.

I zeroed everything and tried Brightness and Contrast. Over time I've found that if I increase brightness it is a good idea to increase contrast by 50% of the brightness increase. Suddenly all the muddy brownish cast was reduced.
I played with RGB using the best results out of the previous tests and printed off another half a dozen. By this time I had to make more A4 polyester sheets

I left printing alone for a couple of days and worked on some graphic ideas. Then this morning I had another whack at it.
My inkjets are Brother MFC-J6510DW. Cheap A3 capable and able to take a set of HUGE ink tanks. A set of 4 tanks will print more than 100 mixed A4 and A3 shirts and lots of mugs. I am still using the bulk Chinese ink a friend loaned me to get started. When I run out I will have to buy Sawgrass ink, but I know what I need to tweak to make it work now.

I have just printed some images and pressed them. What I got on cloth is so close to identical to what I see on my main monitor.
So here are my BASIC settings. Something to help a LINUX user get started.

Some settings obviously don't need changing, but these ones do.

(Experiment with these depending on your paper type and whether you are printing ob cloth or hard surface)
Media Type: Other Photo
Print Quality: Photo


Color/Grayscale: Color (obvious)

Color Mode: Natural (You might like vivid on some jobs)
Halftone Pattern: Dither Seems to make the image sharper - see what you prefer)

Color Enhancement: ON (You need this to make the next bit work)

(Brightness and contrast can make a lot of difference to what you see in the final product. I tried lots of variations but on my printer/monitor combination this works for me)
Brightness: 20
Contrast: 10

And these need tuning also. (
I printed so many pictures with skies, skin tones and sandy beaches, sunsets etc. These are BASIC for MY printer. Easy to remember. Yours will be different. )
Red 0
Green 5
Blue 15

Small changes in the Brightness, Contrast and RGB numbers will fine tune your images. Changes by +/- 5 are easier to see.
I started changing things by +/- 20, then +/- 10, then +/- 5 to see the effects. The wrong change in Brightness and Contrast will LOSE YOUR BLACKS!!!
If you are documenting the settings on each print

[pisquee]

You have done all this work on finding how to get your inks to work, and are now considering changing your ink supplier to Sawgrass? You do realise that Sawgrass' sublimation ink will not be the same as your current ink in terms of colour/gammut, and you will have to retwaek all your work to make the new inks work.
The same is true if you had got a custom ICC profile made - if you change the sublimation ink set, then you need a new profile (or if you change printers)
As you haven't mentioned in your posts what sublimation ink you are actually using, someone else using the same ink and printer combination will not know whether they have the same set up as you to then know that your settings as posted here will then also work or them.

[rossdv8]

Aha, pisquee. You are not always encouraging. Simply blunt, to the point and challenging enough to make one think. Indeed your occasional comments have been a great help in making me think, and have sometimes pointed me in the right direction. I need to thank Paul and the others also that have commented and given me things to thnk about.

After changing my pigment ink yesterday and using the same method to get my colours back - I have a good idea that it works. Took about 4 prints to get my pigment prints matching the screen. So if I am forced to change dye sub inks some time I know the printer settings to play with. For example, the pigment printer needed Brightness 10 contrast 5 red 0 green 5 and blue 10 as a starting point. It ended up at Brightness 10 contrast 5 red -2 green 2 and blue 12. But it only took minutes and a few prints and the results are consistent.

I am sure when I get finicky I will find more fine tuning to do, but it is a start. All I wanted was what I see on the screen to come out on print. Before I started playing with this problem because of dye sub I used to spend hours on each picture trying yo change it so it printed well. That was on genuine inks and paper or canvas. Now it is so simple on either printer and even the laser is better. I haven't got it perfect, but my output is now better than the 2 local commercial places ( both big chains) that charge $22 per mug to put your picture on. - and that is all i am after.

As for changing to Sawgrass, that is an example. There's not a lot of alternative if I have to buy retail. We had a supplier here called Inktec, with affordable inks, but he has stopped offering dye sub ink on his web site.

As for the ink I use, I am well aware of the Sawgrass and desktop printers thing. So I am not mentioning brand names and anyway, the ink I acquired only has chinese writing on it. I suspect any other Linux user will have the same challenges no matter what ink they use. This thread is to help those people find the start point.

[pisquee]

I am happy that you're getting the hang of tweaking so that you can change inks quickly, without having to waste too much time/paper/ink etc.

[rossdv8]

These pics compare the screen shot jpeg with the printed result using dye sub ink and no icc profile.
All that was done was a quick one step adjustment in GIMP > colors > curves, raising the curve one line, then printing. My Brother MFC J6510DW is preset to:

Brightness +10
Contrast +5
Red 0
Green -2
Blue +15

if you compare the collage image with the result printed on the shirt you can see it is close enough.

The reason the shirt colours are not brilliantly vibrant is that the images were dye subbed into treated 100% cotton shirts back in early February and they have been washed in hot water about 40 to 50 times to try to get the colour to fade.

Anyone interested in dye sublimation using LINUX - take heart. It can be done and it is not too difficult.

[rossdv8]

An update for anyone crazy enough to use Linux to produce DyeSub work.

A bit of reading about early Dye Sub suggests that ICC profiles were not always available, and that printer drivers were the only way to get decent results. An example of this might be the Sawgrass Power Driver, which bypasses ICC profiles and directly manipulates the printer. That would also explaiin why adjusting the settings on my printer achieves a good result in the absence of profiles.

Playing with the RGB output of the printer has got me to a setting that produces a nice consistent result on polyester. Printing swatches means I can come close to matching solid colours by picking the printed result that is closest to what I want to match, then using that 'number' colour in GIMP, Inkscape etc. That way even if it looks different on screen, the printed result is good.

Photographs however are my main work, and I had some interesting times experimenting with RGB settings in Colour Balance, then playing with Colour Curves. Recently however, I discovered something amazing. While Curves are very powerful, the quickest and easiest way to give photographs some 'pop' while retaining close to natural colour is using Colour > Levels in GIMP (or Photoshop).

Open the picture in GIMP, choose Color, then Levels. Look at the histogram (a sort of graph) and look for white space at either end of the histogram. Slide the little triangle at the bottom right, to the left until you just hit the black part of the histogram. That will lighten the image overall. Now slide the little triangle at the bottom left, along to towards the right. If your picture had a sort of 'fog' across it, you should suddenly have a very sharp image.

It is almost like putting on a pair of polaroid sunglasses to cut glare.

By judicious adjustment of this Levels control you can quickly go through a collection of pictures and sharpen and brighten each one of them. I have just now finished adjusting most of my favourite photos for my Mugs and the difference when printed is amazing.

Just another little tip for Dye Sub with Linux.

[Paul]

An update for anyone crazy enough to use Linux to produce DyeSub work.

A bit of reading about early Dye Sub suggests that ICC profiles were not always available, and that printer drivers were the only way to get decent results. An example of this might be the Sawgrass Power Driver, which bypasses ICC profiles and directly manipulates the printer. That would also explaiin why adjusting the settings on my printer achieves a good result in the absence of profiles.

correct me if i am wrong but powerdriver DONOT bypass icc profiles. it has ICC build in. so you dont need to use any other icc aware software.

[pisquee]

Yup, all Power Driver is doing, is selecting the appropriate ICC profiles in a more user friendly way. In the same way that the Epson printer driver selects appropriate ICCs for Epson ink and papers, depending on what settings you select.

I would assume that ICCs were not always available from 3rd party ink manufactures (including for sublimation ink) And for a lot of ink manufacturers this is still true, as there are too many possible combinations of printers/inks/RIPs to profile them all - it just wouldn't be economical. This doesn't mean that the kit to create the profiles hasn't been available for a long time, but I would also assume that it also used to be a lot more expensive (or the more affordable/budget options available today weren't an option in the past.)

We have made our own ICC profiles for our inks/papers/substrates on each of our printers. And use some of the methods you talk about with the colour/levels (and others) to match what is on screen to the original artwork, and by putting Photoshop into proof mode, to also tweak colours which are out of gammut to be more in gammut.

You could save yourself so much time and effort (time is money in business) and buy a cheap/old XP PC and an old version of PhotoShop (maybe even your own ICC profiling kit) and using the skills you have built up playing with trying to printing in linux, together with the proper tools, get some excellent results.

It does seem that you are still trying to re-invent the wheel, without really understanding what a wheel is, or how to use the tools to create a wheel.