 need help printing vinyl labels at home...here you go
If you're printing on paper labels, you might as well skip this post because this will have nothing to do with you.
If however, you want to print on the waterproof vinyl labels, and you have photoshop or something comparable, then this might help you out. Before I go much further, I will mention that I have a Canon brand printer with 6 different cartridges for photo colors and regular colors. Other printers may not have the same problems with color bleed like I did.
first off, as with anything, order more labels than you need. For my set of 1000 chips, i needed 2000 labels for front and back. at 63 labels per sheet from onlinelabels.com that came out to be 32 sheets. I ordered 40 sheets and was still short because I had so much trouble getting everything set up.
After much trial and error, I found that the best mode to print to vinyl is to set the opacity of your label layer to about 85% in photoshop and print using the t-shirt transfer mode in your printer. The benefit to this is that the inks dont bleed nearly as much and you still get a nice sharp print. If you print to vinyl in glossy photo or matte photo mode its bleed city. printing in plain paper mode is better but depending on color, it still bleeds. The problem to printing in t-shirt transfer mode is that your picture comes out backwards! You can fix that in photoshop by going to transform, flip horizontal. Now they look backwards on screen, but will print out the right way on the vinyl and have a nice sharp relatively bleed free print.
Now the part where we get stuff lined up. I've found that the label sheets that I recieved werent all exactly the same. Some sheets had labels that were a little bit skewed within the sheet, so that if one label on the left side was lined up perfectly, a label on the right side would be a 1/4 of an inch off. not good. Before you load the sheet into the printer, measure the distance from the corner labels to the top of the sheet, then turn the sheet 180 degrees and measure the other 2 corner labels from the bottom of the sheet. The side that has less of a difference between the labels and the top or bottom edge of the sheet gets put in the printer first.
Print out a test page on plain paper to see if the circles line up with the labels. keep moving the template around on your screen and printing until the circles line up.
Now is the time to add your label picture into the template. Lower the opacity of your picture to 85% and center it into one of the template's circles. If your picture is exactly the same size as your label, you're going to want to make the outside color go out past the label so that if the printer is slightly off, you wont have a white streak down one edge of your label. Once your outside color is out past the circle in the template, go to transform, and flip horizontal. Then start copying it into each of the circles. Once they are all copied, merge the layers of all of the pictures to make minor movement adjustments easier later on down the road.
When you get all of that done, turn off your template layer so that the black lines dont print onto the sheet of labels.
Most likely, you wont get it lined up perfectly the first time because the label sheets and regular paper arent exactly the same size. Thats why we got extra label sheets.
with a little trial and error at the beginning, you should be able to get the complete process down. The key is to be sure to check the dimensions on each and every sheet like I said above for best results.
Well thats all. Hope that I made someones life a little easier.
Last edited by tbid8643 : 07-11-2006 at 10:10 AM.
Reason: spelling error
| 
Linear Mode
