Hot T-shirt designs and design tips by Darkside Digital Arts

NOTE: This tutorial assumes and knowledge of Adobe Photoshop layers, transparent images, and layer styles.

You're a cafepress store owner and you've spent hours on Photoshop to make an amazing design that's going to sell millions of shirts (or so we can dream). You save the image as a .jpg or .png and start to put it onto every product on cafepress.

Now the trouble begins. your beautiful design is either invisible, has elements missing, colors bleeding through in unexpected ways, or simply looks terrible on some of the products. Why?

First, make sure you've got the image the correct size for the product you're placing it on. For t-shirts, I make a 2000x2000 image at 200dpi.

Second, read the "Creating images for black t-shirts" tutorial on Cafepress at http://www.cafepress.com/cp/learn/blackshirts. It will give you a lot of background you need to know.

You'll learn that on black and dark t-shirts, the color white is printed as white, whereas on white and light t-shirts, the color white is considered to be transparent, and wont print at all.

Did you get that point? White in your design prints on dark shirts and doesn't on light ones.

Our tips to help you deal with this feature of cafepress in Photoshop.

1) If your design has transparent portions, create two bottommost layers in your Photoshop design, one solid black, one solid white. (Note: if you're really keen, you can create a layer with each color of the dark and light t-shirts available on Cafepress, like I did). By selectively making these layers visible, you can get an idea before you upload your image how it might appear once it's on a t-shirt.

2) In your Photoshop document, identify the layers or parts of your image that are white or near white. These layers or parts will not appear on light t-shirts.

If white is just part of several colors in an image layer, you'll have to change the white portions to a different color it if you want it to show up on white t-shirts. If it's an entire layer that's white, apply a color overlay in the layer style menu to change the whole layer at one.

Either way, you should duplicate the layers that you need to be different for black t-shirts and white t-shirts. Then you can name the duplicated layers helpful names like, "For black Santa image" and "For white Santa image".

3) Remember! Make the correct layers visible and turn off all background layers before saving your image as a .jpg or .png for upload to Cafepress.

I hope this tutorial on designing for BOTH black t-shirts and white t-shirts in the same photoshop document for Cafepress has been helpful. Please email me or comment if you think I need to add or change anything in this cafepress and Phtoshop tutorial.

Darkside Digital Arts