These are available both in my Etsy and in the Store.  Pop over and get yourself some!  Or of course you can visit the Candeystore and upload your own images for custom fabric!

In ancient Egypt, the Pharohs often wore clothing made of thin threads of beaten gold.  Some fabrics had up to 500 gold threads in each inch of fabric!!

Pssst… a little secret for our blog readers – we’re tentatively scheduled to have our full website open by the end of May as well, and you’ll just looove all the features and options you’ll have to play around with then.  We’ll keep ya posted!

• A high resolution image file.  You can submit your images to us in either  JPEG, PNG, or TIFF format.  If submitting a TIFF file, do not compress the image.  We recommend your files be created with a resolution of 150 dpi or higher.  (No cheating here – do not try to create your image at 72 dpi and then convert or resize it to 150dpi – we can tell when you do this and it does not produce the best result).  The minimum dpi that we can accept will be 150dpi.

Here are some things that can be done to minimize the color shifting between on-screen and printed images.  Some of these techniques are for more advanced designers, but don’t worry – you will still get great prints using the procedures above.  Some other image creation tips are:

• Order a swatch - when color matching is a high-priority we recommend ordering a swatch of your fabric design prior to placing an order for yardage.
• Color mode: If possible you should try to create your image in the LAB color mode.  LAB, or CIE Lab is a color space that gives the most consistent representation of color regardless of the device used to create it.  This will decrease the  color shifting in your printed images to only colors that are out of our printers gamut.
• Users can install our color swatch files: We have created a swatch of colors in Photoshop that you can install and use to create your images.  This swatch represents colors that can be reproduced with our printers with no shifting of colors.  Click here to download our custom swatch file.  Save the *.aco file in: Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop X\Presets\Color Swatches  X is the version number for your install of Photoshop. To load: go to the Swatches palette, then click the small arrow in the top right corner and choose printswatch.aco from the swatch collections and click load.
• Advanced users can install our ICC Profile: An ICC Profile is a file that describes how a device (i.e. a printer, monitor, scanner, etc.) reproduces color.  We can provide you with an ICC Profile of our printer.  With an accurately calibrated monitor, this profile can be used to generate a ‘soft proof’ of your image in Photoshop versions 6.0 and later, which will show you what your printed image will look like.    Click here to download the ICC Profile.  After downloading, right-click on the file and select install profile.  Then in Photoshop, open your image, go to View>Proof Setup>Custom and you can select the Eye Candey ICC Profile.  This will show you what your image file will look like printed on our printers.  Your original image won’t be changed in any way.

First off, color management is not a precise science.  The colors that you see on your computer monitor cannot be perfectly reproduced by any printer on the market today due to several reasons

• The human eye can perceive colors in a wider gamut (range)  than a printer can produce, and in fact, the same exact image can look different from person to person, so what you see on screen can appear off from the same image after it’s been printed.
• An image will look different printed on paper than it will printed on canvas, or fabric, or vellum, or vinyl, etc. so there are several variables that will make it look different than what you see on your screen
• An identical image can vary in how it looks on your monitor compared to any other monitor due to differences in resolution settings, calibrations that may have been performed to adjust color, different manufacturers of the monitors, and so on…
• Similar to the above, the same image will look different if it is printed on an Epson printer, than it would printed on a Canon, HP, Roland, or any other due to the variance in inks.
• Images displayed on-screen will usually appear more saturated and bold than they possibly could if they are reproduced by ink on fabric, or paper, etc.

Sooo, now that you know a bit about the “why’s” of printed vs. displayed colors, we need to work on the “how’s”.  How to prepare our image files to get the closest color match we can to our printed items.  That’ll be the topic of our next post on color management.  See ya soon!