Throwback Thursday. Rick wrote the original version of this post in January 2023. Nothing in it has stopped being true. What has changed is the shop side. Printers now own spectrophotometers and light booths, and they are asking the ink companies why the formulas still don’t measure up. Here’s the rundown, updated. Why Color Matching Is Still Nearly Impossible on T-Shirts

“The color doesn’t match what we sent you.” Every shop hears it. Here are the reasons, and this is not even the full list.

What the customer sends

A screen image. Monitors are backlit and made of pixels. Shirts are not. The customer’s team of thirteen each looks at the file on a different home screen. None of them match each other, and none of them match the shop.

A phone approval. Six-color mockups the size of a fingernail, approved at a stoplight.

A faded Pantone book. Books fade in months. Some arrive wrong. One ink company rejected about 5% of its books right out of the box. Pantone’s own guidance says normal “usage, handling and exposure may render your colors inaccurate,” and it recommends replacing guides every 12 to 18 months. Most customers have one book, and it’s old.

No Pantone number at all. A painting. A sleeve. A ten-year-old shirt washed a hundred times. People can distinguish about a million colors. The coated book has 2,139. That’s why we ask for the number. (See Misprint Monday: Pantone Sucks.)

What the shop does with it (Rick)

Buys books. The shop buys several every year, compares them against each other, and retires the ones the ones that fade. Books cost >$90. The ink mixer, two artists, and four customer service people each need one within reach. That’s about >$1,800 a year, and the books still fade.

Mixes to a formula. Most of our ink is Avient, which licenses Pantone formulas. The formulas are good. They are not perfect. Raw materials change. Pigment batches change.

Mixes as little as possible. Ink runs up to $150 a gallon. Scales have a tolerance, so small batches drift more. The printer wants to mix less. Accuracy wants more. Then the bucket gets checked, and bucket ink never looks like shirt ink. A swab is closer. It still isn’t the print.

Prints it, and film thickness takes over.  Change the deposit and you change the color. Humidity, platen temperature, flood, squeegee speed, pressure, angle, durometer, mesh, thread, emulsion thickness, off-contact, the garment itself. Each one is its own post. Some already are: Why Can’t I Hold Detail in My Screenprints?, TBT: Emulsion over Mesh, and TBT: Screen Printing Exposure.

Fights metamerism. The ink matches in the bucket. It matches on the screen. On the shirt, next to the other colors, it doesn’t. That’s metamerism, and it’s your eyes, not the ink.

Underbase it. On a dark shirt, translucent ink picks up the white base. On a pale yellow shirt with no base, a red goes orange. White-base and no-base need different formulas. Ink companies don’t publish them, because the formulas aren’t accurate and they don’t want the liability. Shops develop their own or get the customer to accept the difference.

Or discharge it. Discharge is its own difficulty level. Shirts discharge unevenly, some dyes don’t discharge at all, and black sometimes goes yellow. Read TBT: Discharge Printing before you promise a match.

Watches it drift, then cures it, and it changes again. The sample matched. Then the flash heated the platens, agitation thinned the ink, and the stencil broke down. Halftones gained. Then the dryer shifted it one more time.

What’s changed since 2023

Shops started measuring. In January 2025 a contract printer who posts as Atownsend opened a thread on The Shirt Board called How accurate are your colors? He runs a calibrated benchtop spectro, X-Rite Color iControl, and a D50 light booth. He wanted his 30 to 35 house colors to land within “5 or 6 deltas” on white and black shirts. His Rutland M3 system wasn’t getting there, and when he took his data to the ink lab, “they aren’t interested in any of the data.” He was told they match “by eye under CWF lighting.” His reply: “I feel like our ink systems should be working for us, not the other way around.”

The thread ran 27 posts. Here’s what the room said.

No system is accurate across the board.

Tony Pepitone: “I have never found a mixing system, RFU or PC based, that is accurate across the board. Especially when we get to tertiary colors.” Pierre at blue moon went through the same fight with Union ten years ago and got nowhere: “In the end we just gave up and let the quality drop a notch.”

“Pantone approved” means less than it sounds. Tony: the ink company “has to get x-percentage of the Pantone book approved….not every color in the book!!!” Pierre put the number at about 100 formulas out of nearly 3,000 and called the certification “a JOKE.” Those are forum figures, not Pantone’s, and I could not confirm them. Take them as two veterans’ read on it.

The lab’s baseline is not your press. Atownsend reported that Avient’s IMS formulas are matched on a 156 mesh on a white shirt, by eye, under CWF light. The Pantone book itself says to view under D50. When he replicates those lab conditions, his prints land “within 3 deltas.” At 305 mesh, wet on wet, with a thin deposit, they don’t. CBCB summed it up: “There is no standard.”

The same ink prints two colors. Tony proved it by accident on a 6,000-piece run of PMS 302. The ops set one press with two 196 screens and the other with two 158s. “Same ink but application yielded two very different colors.” That is Rick’s film-thickness point, in one job, with the receipts.

Formulas change under you. Zelko-4-EVA and Atownsend both have repeat jobs where IMS updated the formula since the first run. The “same” color now mixes different. Both label containers with the original formula and stir PC pigments nearly every day.

The workaround is email. Admiral has emailed the Wilflex lab for corrected formulas on “400 Pantones+.” CBCB tried the same with Rio and found “some 2016 or dateless colours are still way off.” His question: there are fewer than 3,000 colors, so “how have shops not ran into every colour yet?”

So what’s the match?

There is still no industry standard for “close enough.” The only real measure is the customer paying the invoice. Negotiate tolerance up front. Keep a record of exactly how every color was mixed and printed, down to mesh and base, so you can hit it again.

One thing is new. The tools now exist to put a number on it. Atownsend’s point stands: packaging, commercial print, and big textile all calibrate to one standard. “Why can’t we?” Until the ink labs answer that, the match is still yours to make.