Textile design glossary

An allover (all-over) print covers the full width and length of the fabric with a repeating design, so it can be cut in any direction. Kurti fabric, dress material and bedsheet prints are often allover designs. Because the pattern repeats again and again, the tile must join cleanly on all four sides.

See also: Repeat, Seamless, Placement print

The border is the decorated band along one or both long edges of a saree, dupatta or bedsheet. It repeats only in one direction, along the length, so it is designed as a strip with its own repeat. In a saree file, the border has to meet the pallu and the body neatly, and its colours usually match colours used elsewhere in the design.

See also: Pallu, Repeat, Placement print

A butta (or buti, for the smaller version) is a small single motif such as a flower, leaf or paisley that is scattered or repeated across a fabric. Butta designs are common in sarees, dress material and dupattas. When you set butta in a half-drop repeat, the motifs sit in staggered rows and the layout looks even without obvious lines.

See also: Motif, Repeat, Half-drop repeat

CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black), the four inks of process printing. Mixed in small dots, they reproduce a wide range of colours, which is how paper printing works. Textile screen printing mostly uses spot colours instead, while digital textile printers usually have CMYK inks plus extra colours.

See also: RGB, Spot channel, RIP (raster image processor)

A colourway is one colour combination of a design, with the same motifs and layout in new colours. Mills often sell one print in several colourways, for example a floral kurti fabric in maroon, navy and mustard grounds. In screen printing the same screens can be reused for each colourway, with only the inks changed.

See also: Ground, Motif, Pantone TCX

DPI (dots per inch) tells you how densely an image is printed. At 300 DPI, a 58-inch-wide print needs 58 × 300 = 17,400 pixels across. Changing the DPI number in a file without adding pixels only changes the label; the print stays as sharp or as soft as the pixels allow.

See also: PPI (pixels per inch), Upscaling, RIP (raster image processor)

The ground is the background colour of a printed design, behind the motifs. A navy ground with white flowers is a different look from a white ground with navy flowers, even with the same motifs. In screen printing, a dark ground may be printed as its own screen or achieved by printing on dyed fabric.

See also: Motif, Colourway, Allover

In a half-drop repeat, every second column of tiles is moved down by half the repeat height. This staggers the motifs and hides the straight lines and gaps that a simple block repeat can show. It is a common choice for butta layouts on sarees and dress material.

See also: Repeat, Butta, Seamless

LZW is a lossless compression method you can choose when saving a TIFF. The file gets smaller, but every pixel stays exactly the same, unlike JPG compression, which throws detail away. Saving a large saree design as an LZW TIFF is a safe way to send a smaller file to the print house.

See also: DPI (dots per inch), RGB, RIP (raster image processor)

A motif is one drawn element of a design, for example a rose, a peacock, a paisley (kairi) or a geometric star. Patterns are built by arranging motifs in a repeat. A designer may keep a library of motifs and recombine them into new sarees, borders and allover prints.

See also: Butta, Repeat, Ground

Multichannel is a Photoshop colour mode in which the image is a set of separate greyscale channels, without a combined RGB or CMYK image. Separation files for screen printing are often saved this way, with one spot channel per screen. These files are usually saved as PSD so the channels and their ink colours are kept.

See also: Spot channel, CMYK, RGB

The pallu (also called the aanchal) is the loose end of a saree that falls over the shoulder or is draped over the head. It usually carries the heaviest motifs and the most colours, so designers draw it as a separate panel from the body. In a digital print saree file, check the pallu panel for sharpness on its own, since its fine detail shows first.

See also: Border, Placement print, Butta

Pantone TCX is the Pantone colour system for textiles in which each shade is dyed on cotton and given a code such as 19-4052 TCX. Buyers quote these codes so the mill and the designer match the same physical colour. Because a screen shows colours differently, check the actual fabric card instead of the on-screen value when matching an ink.

See also: Colourway, Strike-off, RGB

Pigment printing uses insoluble colour particles held on the fabric by a binder, which is set by heat. It works on many fibres and usually needs no steaming or washing after printing, so it is simpler and cheaper to run. The colour sits on the surface, so the hand feel can be slightly stiffer than reactive printing on cotton.

See also: Reactive printing, Sublimation printing, Rotary screen

A placement print is designed for one exact place on the garment, for example a neckline motif on a kurti, a print on a T-shirt chest or the pallu of a saree. It does not repeat across the fabric, so the file is drawn at the exact size of that panel. Placement prints are often printed on flatbed screens or digitally because the design may be larger than a rotary screen repeat.

See also: Allover, Pallu, Border

PPI (pixels per inch) describes the image file itself: how many of its pixels are spread over each inch of print. A 6,000-pixel-wide design printed 20 inches wide is 6,000 ÷ 20 = 300 PPI. Photoshop's Image Size box shows this value as "Resolution", and most print houses say DPI when they mean PPI.

See also: DPI (dots per inch), Upscaling, RGB

Reactive printing uses dyes that form a chemical bond with cellulose fibres such as cotton, viscose and linen. After printing, the fabric is steamed and washed to fix the dye and remove the excess. The result is soft and fast to washing, which is why it is used for cotton kurtis, dress material and bedsheets.

See also: Pigment printing, Sublimation printing, Strike-off

The repeat is the smallest piece of a design that tiles across and down the fabric to make the full print. Its size matters for printing: on a rotary machine the vertical repeat must divide the screen circumference exactly, for example 320 mm on a 640 mm screen. Designers also choose a repeat type, such as a straight (block) repeat or a half-drop.

See also: Half-drop repeat, Seamless, Rotary screen

RGB (red, green, blue) is how screens, phones and cameras make colour by mixing light. Most textile designs are created in RGB, and the print house's RIP converts them to its inks. Some very bright RGB colours, like an electric green on a monitor, cannot be matched exactly on fabric, so a strike-off is the real check.

See also: CMYK, RIP (raster image processor), Pantone TCX

A RIP (raster image processor) is the software between your design file and a digital textile printer. It handles colour profiles for the fabric and ink, scales the image and turns it into ink dots for the print heads. When a digital print does not match the screen, the RIP colour settings are one of the first things a print house checks.

See also: DPI (dots per inch), CMYK, Sublimation printing

A rotary screen is a hollow nickel cylinder with fine holes engraved where one colour should print; ink is pushed through it as the cloth moves underneath. A machine runs one screen per colour. Common circumferences include 640, 819, 914 and 1018 mm, and the design's vertical repeat must divide the circumference exactly.

See also: Repeat, Spot channel, Strike-off

A seamless tile joins with copies of itself on every side without a visible line, step or colour change. Designers check this by offsetting the tile by half its width and height (Filter > Other > Offset in Photoshop) and repairing the joins. On a rotary screen, a design that is not seamless shows a mark once on every turn of the screen.

See also: Repeat, Allover, Rotary screen

A spot channel stores one printing ink as a greyscale image: black where the ink prints fully, white where it does not. In textile screen printing, each spot channel becomes one screen, so an 8-colour design has 8 spot channels. You create one from the Channels panel menu with New Spot Channel and give it the ink colour so the preview looks like the print.

See also: Multichannel, Trapping, Rotary screen

A strike-off is a small test print made on the actual fabric with the actual inks and screens, so the buyer can approve colours and detail before production. In rotary printing it comes after the screens are engraved, so mistakes found here are costly to fix. Digital sampling is often used first to check a design before screens are made.

See also: Rotary screen, Colourway, Pantone TCX

In sublimation printing, the design is printed on special paper with disperse dyes and then pressed onto polyester with heat, where the dye turns to gas and enters the fibres. The print does not crack and the fabric stays soft. It works on polyester and high-polyester blends, which is why it is common for polyester sarees, sportswear and dupattas, and it does not work well on cotton.

See also: Reactive printing, Pigment printing, RIP (raster image processor)

Trapping means making one colour area slightly larger so that it overlaps the colour next to it. Screens on a printing machine never line up perfectly, and without this overlap a small shift leaves thin lines of unprinted fabric between colours. The lighter colour is usually spread under the darker one, and the amount is agreed with the printer.

See also: Spot channel, Rotary screen, Strike-off

Upscaling makes an image larger in pixels so it can print bigger or sharper. Simple resizing stretches the existing pixels and makes edges soft, while AI upscaling rebuilds fine detail such as thin lines and motif edges. A 2,000-pixel design enlarged 4× becomes 8,000 pixels, enough for about 26 inches at 300 DPI (8,000 ÷ 300 = 26.7).

See also: DPI (dots per inch), PPI (pixels per inch), Seamless