What Registration Means in Multi-Colour Printing
By The Velocity Wear Team
Registration is how accurately each colour layer lines up with the ones printed before it. Every colour in a screen print is a separate screen laid down in sequence, so a four-colour design is four passes that all have to agree with each other. Designs where colours meet edge to edge are hardest, which is why printers build in deliberate overlaps, called traps, so a small shift shows as a slight overlap rather than a white gap.
One Screen for Every Colour
On a carousel press the garment sits on a platen and rotates under each screen in turn. Reds, then blues, then the black outline. The press is set up so every screen drops onto the same coordinates, and that setup is most of the work in a multi-colour job. It is also why screen printing carries a setup cost per colour: each additional colour means another screen, another stencil, another alignment.
Why Perfect Alignment Is Not Available
Fabric is not paper. A jersey tee stretches under a squeegee and relaxes afterwards. Platen adhesive holds the garment, but not perfectly. The mesh itself flexes as the squeegee passes and snaps back behind it. On thick fleece the ink lands on a compressible surface that rebounds once the pressure lifts. Add up those small movements and you get a realistic tolerance rather than a theoretical one. Good printing is not the absence of movement. It is designing so movement does not show.
The Designs That Make It Hard
Some artwork is unforgiving by construction. Two flat colours meeting along a long, gentle curve will reveal a shift anywhere along that curve. Small text in one colour sitting inside a shape of another is a classic problem, because at that size a fraction of a millimetre is visible. Thin outlines that abut rather than overlap have the same weakness. A busy, textured, illustrative design, by contrast, absorbs a surprising amount of movement without anyone ever noticing.
Trapping, Chokes and the Humble Keyline
Trapping means deliberately extending one colour slightly under its neighbour so the two overlap. If the layers shift, the overlap narrows or widens, but no garment colour shows through the join. A choke is the reverse, pulling a layer back a fraction. The most common example is the white underbase on a dark garment, choked slightly so that if the top colours move, white does not peek out from behind them and outline everything in a pale halo.
The most useful trick in this whole area is the keyline. A black outline around the elements of a multi-colour design absorbs registration error almost invisibly, because the eye reads the outline as the edge and never sees the join underneath. It is a stylistic choice that happens to double as free insurance, which is a large part of why so much classic printed merchandise looks the way it does.
- Overlap colours that meet, rather than butting them exactly edge to edge.
- Add a keyline or outline where the style allows, and small shifts disappear entirely.
- Avoid two-colour text at small sizes, and keep fine type to a single colour.
- Choke the white underbase slightly so it cannot show around the colours printed on top.
- Reduce the colour count where you can, since fewer layers means fewer chances to disagree.
Registration on Dark Garments Is a Harder Problem
Print on white and you may have three colours to align. Print the same design on black and you have a white underbase, a flash cure, then those same three colours, all of which have to sit inside the underbase. The underbase is also the layer everything gets judged against: if it shows, it shows as a bright halo on a dark background, which is far more obvious than a small gap on a white tee. This is a large part of why a design that is straightforward on a light garment gets treated as a bigger job on a dark one.
What Misregistration Is Not
Two other faults get blamed on registration. Ink bleed, where colours look soft and merged at the edges, is usually about ink or fabric rather than alignment. A slightly fuzzy edge on brushed or textured fabric is the surface, not the press. Genuine misregistration has a specific signature: a clean sliver of the wrong colour, or of the garment itself, along one side of a join, running consistently in the same direction across the whole design.
“"Design the artwork so a millimetre of movement is invisible, and nobody ever has to find out how much movement there was."”
Raising It Before You Approve Artwork
If your design has tight colour-to-colour contact, say so at the proofing stage and ask how it will be trapped. It may mean a small change to the artwork, adding an outline or nudging one shape under another, and that is a two-minute conversation before production rather than a difficult one about a finished run. If the design genuinely cannot tolerate any overlap, DTF is worth considering: the whole image is printed as a single film, so colour-to-colour alignment stops being a variable at all.
Velocity Wear works entirely online, from a 20-piece minimum with sizes mixed freely, and bulk discounts reach up to around 40% as quantities rise. As qualitative guidance, screen printing runs around 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval, and production starts at approval rather than at order placement, so a quick proofing round protects your date.