Four-color (CMYK) printing on textile

Four-color printing (CMYK) is a printing mode that reconstructs every color of a visual from four base inks: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. On textile, it lets you print photos and gradients without adding ink per shade, unlike a flat-color technique.

Four-color printing in practice

The principle comes from paper printing: overlapping tiny dots of the four CMYK inks is enough to recreate almost any color to the eye. On a garment, this mode contrasts with flat-color printing (one ink per color, the classic screen-printing approach), where every extra shade adds a step and a cost.

That's why four-color printing is the standard as soon as a visual contains a photo, a gradient, or more than three or four colors: digital techniques like DTF use it by default, with no surcharge tied to the number of shades. Screen printing can also print in four colors, but with one extra technical constraint (halftone dot screening), which is trickier to set up than a flat color.

What to remember

• Four-color printing recreates every color from four inks (CMYK), as opposed to one ink per color.
• It's needed as soon as a custom design mixes a logo, a photo and a gradient: the number of colors no longer changes the price.
• On textile, DTF uses it natively; screen printing can also produce it, with more setup involved.