Printing Tip 4 - Embroidery

The embroidery process begins with an idea or a piece of artwork. That artwork then has to be "digitized" which is a specialised process whereby 2 dimensional artwork is converted into stitches or thread. While a business card, letterhead, or a decal will suffice as artwork, camera-ready or computer generated graphics from a program such as Corel Draw or Adobe Photoshop result in much higher quality embroidery.

The "digitizer" has to actually recreate the artwork using stitches - that is, the digitizer programmes the sewing machine to sew a specific design, with a specific type of stitch, in specific colours. This process is known as digitizing.

An embroidered image is 3 dimensional, so some exciting effects can be included to "liven up" a piece of artwork that is normally flat.

As soon as the Art Department have digitized the artwork, it will be sent to you for approval. Then it is then ready to be put into production. This is a very hands on process, as specific thread colors must be loaded by hand into the machines. A spool of thread for each color for each sewing head must be loaded. The machine itself is programmed by the operator to sew the design in a particular color sequence. The garments must then be "hooped" individually, again by hand, and then loaded into the machine. Once the design has completed sewing, the garment is taken off the machine, un-hooped, and then sent to the finishing process.

Finishing involves removing extraneous stitches accumulated during the embroidery process and removing the backing material used to stabilize the fabric during embroidery. After a final quality inspection, the products are then folded and packaged ready for shipping to the customer.

Printing Tip 3

More acronyms.....

CMYK is a print process that uses 4 colours - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and blacK. These four colours are used to produce all other colour ranges. This method is used in most full-colour commercial printing.

PMS refers to the Pantone Matching System, which provides a standard for describing printed colours using specific inks, and therefore results in the best colour replication for your artwork. The Pantone Color Matching System expands upon existing color reproduction systems such as the CMYK process. The Pantone system is based on a specific mix of pigments to create new colors—referred to as spot colours.

RGB refers to the primary colours, Red, Green and Blue. It is an additive colour model in which the 3 primary colours are combined in varying intensities to produce all the other colours. Monitors, scanners and even the marvellous human eye use RGB to produce or detect colour.

PDF stands for Portable Document Format.

This is used by Adobe Acrobat, Adobe's electronic publishing software for Windows, Mac OS, UNIX and DOS. You need the Adobe Reader software to view and print PDF files. PDF files can represent both vector and bitmap graphics.

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Printing Tip 2

Printing acronyms - GIF, TIFF, BMP & JPEG......


Confused? Let us help.


GIF stands for Graphic Interchange Format. GIF files are bitmap format files commonly used to compress files to minimise the file size - so that they can be displayed on the Web in HTML documents and in other online services. The process used is a loss-less data compression technique, which results in a reduction of file size without degradation of visual quality.


TIFF - Tagged Image File Format - is a file format for storing images, including photographs and line art. It is a popular format for high colour depth images. TIFF format is widely supported by all image-manipulation applications.

BMP or Bitmap files are images composed of a rectangular grid of squares called pixels. Each pixel contains information that describes whether it is black, white or has a colour value. BMP files are usually not compressed, so they are typically much larger than compressed image file formats for the same image. Therefore they are generally unsuitable for transferring images on the internet or other slow or capacity-limited media.

JPEG is a commonly used standard method of compression for photographic images. The name JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the name of the committee who created the standard. The compression method selectively discards data, meaning that some visual quality is lost in the process.

Stay tuned for more helpful hints from the Team at Sea Dragon Promo Products!!

Printing Tip 1

What is EPS format?

Any time you want your promotional products decorated, the printer will normally require your artwork in EPS format. EPS stands for Encapsulated Post Script. It is a file format that supports both PC and Mac images - they're platform independent. This format is used to transfer Postscript language artwork between different programs.

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