Energised by yesterday’s t-shirt sale I went back to RedBubble with the intention of totally spring cleaning my online shop there. When I got to the site I discovered a new feature that they are calling BubbleSites. It is a nice looking page that you can set up to act as the shopping cart for people to buy t-shirts of the images they like from your own website.
So of course I lost no time in setting one up for Starbright Illustrations. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Stabright Ts. And the first image I uploaded was the Alien DJ, one of the first designs I ever did for a t-shirt, which has been hanging around on my hard drive – and online – for some time now.
I’m also going to be producing images specially for this new part of the site, featuring prominently cute characters and other t-shirt friendly art.
So I opened GIMP and sketched an image which I called “Happy Rhino”, a bright pink rhino with a big cheese eating smile on his face. I was very happy with it, and I saved it in the required png format. But when I uploaded it the t-shirt image on the gallery site looked a little paler than the original. It looked kind of bleached out. Here take a look…
And the Alien DJ colours look a little muted as well. So the question is, why?
I popped open the RedBubble advice page on how to make a great looking t-shirt to find out.
And in the first couple of paragraphs the page advises,
PNG files only deal with colours in RGB but our printers print your tees in CMYK so the best way to get the most out of your design is to create the image in CMYK and convert it to RGB before you save your document. Depending on what graphics software you are using, this should be easy to change. In both Photoshop and Gimp you will find these settings under image > mode.
Hmm, perhaps that was what I was doing wrong. I went back to GIMP to see what I could do about it, but I couldn’t find a CMYK option and every change I attempted on the huge png file took so long I just wanted to give up, and crawl away and die.
I’ll probably try again in a few days though, once one of these problems gets under my skin I just can’t rest until it’s solved. Oh well.
