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When printing images on paper I think most of us are used to, at the very least, selecting the “Photo” or “Best Photo” setting on our printer and hoping for the best which is usually pretty good to excellent. But getting the best possible print on a piece fabric can be a little more challenging.

Tweaking
Photoshop Elements, together with your printer settings, have a lot more to offer in the way of tweaking your images than you may know. And the best way I’ve found to determine the best settings to use when printing an image on fabric, is to print out a test sheet (or two or three) of images onto a piece of fabric and then compare the results. You can see the results of one of my tests on the image to the right.

What you’ll need
For this tutorial I’m using Photoshop Elements (version 6) and my printer (Epson 1100) however if you have different software and printer, you may have similar settings or options.

Get an image to use for the test
You can use your own image if you like but make sure the image is full of different tones and colors, or you can download this test print to use. Click on the image to bring it up to full size, then “right click and save” to your desktop.

1. First of all prepare a piece of fabric for printing.
Iron a piece of white fabric onto a piece of letter size freezer paper – see this tutorial – or use my favorite method, press it onto a letter size piece of sticky label – instructions can be found here. Remember that the quality of your print will be determined by the quality of your fabric. For best results use a smooth tightly woven fabric such as pfd (prepared for dyeing) fabric.

2. Open the test image in Photoshop Elements, and then make a new file size 4.5″ wide by 1.5″ high by 300 pixels.

3. Copy and paste, or drag the test image into the blank file and position it on the far left of the new file.

4. Now select the test image and increase the saturation by 20-30%; you can adjust this as required. Then copy and paste, or drag the image into the blank file and position it in the middle.

5. Undo the changes to the saturation on the test image, and increase the contrast instead. Copy and paste, or drag the image into the blank file and position it on the right hand side.

You should now have three images in one file, each with a slightly different saturation and contrast adjustment settings. You probably can’t notice the difference looking at them on your computer, but each image is slightly different. Save the file so you don’t lose it.

6. From the main menu select Print, and this opens the print options box.

There are lots of different settings you can choose, but we’re specifically going to be looking at the Color Management settings.

You’ll notice that the Color Handling setting offers you options -
Printer manages color
Photoshop Elements manages color

Choose Photoshop Elements manages color

Make sure the Printer Profile is set to Working RGB – Adobe RGB
and Rendering Intent is set to Saturation
If you’re not sure what these settings are for, click the Help button or you can find an explanation here.

7. Now position your image to print .25″ from the top and .25″ from the left, or as close to the top and left hand margins as possible.

8. Then click Print which should open up your printer preferences dialog box. Select the Photo and Plain Paper settings and print.

You may need to consult your printer manual on how to disable the color management on your printer. This is what it looks like on my Epson 1100.

9. Once printed, write on the fabric using a fine point sharpie or an ink pen, the settings that you used.

10. Next I chose to print the same settings except instead of Plain Paper I chose Premium Presentation Matte Paper and instead of Photo I chose Best Photo. Also make sure you reposition the image to print 2″ down from the top and .25″ in from the side. Then print.

11. Again, once this is printed, write the settings you used.

It’s becoming pretty obvious that allowing Photoshop Elements to handle the color management is not producing very good results; at least not with those particular settings.

12. To allow your printer to handle the color management, change the Color Handling setting in Photoshop to Printer manages color and for the next print, set the image to print at 2.75″ from the top and .5″ from the left. Then select print.

13. Your printer options box should open up and your printer settings will be different depending on what brand printer you use, but my printer allows me various options and for this print I chose Photo, Plain Paper and in the Color Management section, Epson Vivid. Then print.

Now I seem to be getter much better color reproduction.

You should now be able to see that there are lots of different options and lots of different combinations of options that you can tweak. And you can see that just by making the smallest of adjustments to your settings, it can sometimes change the results dramatically. For this particular image I can see that by adjusting the magenta color a little more I could probably get an excellent print of this image.

By using an image size 1.5″ x 1.5″ with three different saturation and contrast adjustments, you can fit 7 rows of prints on one page.

So now you know what settings to tweak, you can play around with them until you’re happy with the result. Different images may require different tweakings, but once you’ve done this test once or twice using images with different color tones, you’ll begin to understand what settings you need to tweak for different ranges of color and it won’t be so confusing. Happy tweaking!

Be sure to leave a comment if you enjoyed this tutorial.

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