 Welcome to BCH Technologies. This is Kevin. Today we're going to talk about how to make your sublimation ink have a more accurate color, brighter color, and dramatically improve the quality of your transformation. This is part two of the video. We're going to use this machine, which has all sorts of problems. The heating plate is not heated evenly. The temperature reading is not accurate and fluctuates out of control. Thus, if we can make this sublimation work, we can make it work for any machine. Again, we're going to get what we pay for. For the hard surface transfer, such as aluminum or coffee mugs, people usually keep the temperature constant and vary the transfer time. For the four colors of ink, black, cyan, magenta, and yellow, each color is sublimated at a different rate. So the black color is the last one to transfer its face. Actually, the black color is the hardest color to sublimate. Untransferred black is brown, so if we do not apply enough heat to black, the color will not be fully transformed, or we call it under sublimated, and the result will be a brownish color. However, if the heating time is too long, the already transferred black will transfer back, which we call de-sublimated, and the result is also brownish black. Let me give an example of under sublimated. We have three aluminum plates which were transferred at the same temperature of 325 degrees. At 75 seconds, the bottom right corner was transferred perfectly. However, the top left corner is less desirable. This is because the heat plate wasn't heated evenly, and that the top left was cooler than the bottom. Therefore, the top left didn't fully transfer. We give the top left corner more time by adding 25 more seconds, and we can see the quality is much better. We're still not fully satisfied with the transferred rate, so to make all the colors on the left corner fully transferred, we increase the time to 150 seconds. We can see the quality of the left corner now is perfect. However, because of the long heating time, the bottom right corner has started to de-sublimate. Therefore, we need to play with the temperature and time to find the best setting for our machine. We cannot rely on the manufacturer or internet suggestions regarding the setting. In this video, we're going to find the best temperature setting for a polyester transfer. First, we'll use a laser gun to measure the temperature across the hot plate, and check the evenness of the temperature distribution and temperature accuracy. Then we're going to transfer at 20 degrees intervals from 350 to 450 degrees, and keep the time constant at 60 seconds. And then we'll use a color checker to check the black color. We'll see the brownish-black at 450 degrees. And this means it's too high. And the same brownish color occurs at a lower temperature too. So we'll eliminate the temperatures that creates the brownish-black. We'll then make more transfers with more temperature settings in between. So after that, we'll have a 5-degree difference. Afterward, we'll take the remaining candidates, outdoors, and check under the direct sunlight and also in the shade. Another way is to take them to a paint department of Home Depot or Lowe's. Not Lowe's, I hate Lowe's. Where they have a light box in the paint department, and you can simulate different light source. If you transfer this to a fabric, there may be chances that your customer will wear your product outdoors. Although all the colors look black indoors, now we can see some of the colors change under the sun. After the final selection, we'll choose 377 to be our ideal temperature. After deciding on the temperature and the transfer time to get the black color for the transfer, we'll now tweak the other colors. There are two levels of color management. The lower level is the printer. Some printers come with a color management profile, and some don't. The higher level is the software. If a software tells the printer which color profile to use, it will overwrite the printer's choice, which is lower choice. If the software didn't, the printer has the choice of choosing a default profile or print it without any profile management at all. To show the difference, let's make a transfer without any color management. Because many full color printers are designed for office use, the color management profile is not always set. Many people print horrible colors because they are printed without a profile. We'll use Photoshop, which has a good control over how the color profile is handled. We can see the printer's default is set to Epson IG Printer 07. We select it to let the printer to manage the color. If we print it right now, the printer is going to use this 07 color profile to print. What we're going to do is go to the printer settings. Now we're at the lower level and turn this off. The printer will not manage the color either. Afterward, we're going to let the printer to manage the profile. This process will use the default Epson profile, Epson IG Printer 07. Because most sublimation ink manufacturers use Epson's default profile as a target and make their ink as true to the profile as possible, this profile can fix most of the color problems. We still let the printer manage the color and turn the color correction from no color adjustment to ICM. We can see the result is much better when we use the color management. Therefore, the printer's color profile will help us to get a true color in most cases. However, what if we want the color to be spot on? For example, this fabric has a yellow tint. So the generic Epson profile won't accommodate this change. And now it looks a bit warmer than it should be. So if we're not happy with Epson's default, we can also make our own correction by changing the parameters at the printer's preference window. You can click the color controls or changing the tint from the Photoshop. To do it professionally, we need to make a customized ICC profile. An ICC profile is needed when we have a change in reproduction. For example, when we're switching from one ink supplier to another ink supplier or we change a heat machine or maybe we have lots of orders and we have to use multiple printers. We want the final product to look exactly like the same product we did before. To do this, we'll need a special machine or use an ICC service such as a bchtechservice at bchtechnologies.com. There are three steps to be done. The first step is to download a color target file and print it without any color management. This step is exactly what we did earlier, which we printed a picture and transferred it without any color management. We have a detailed description on the bchtech website and I'll show you how to do it on each machine. Now we'll download the files from the page. The second step is to transfer the target to a flat surface and send it back to the bchtech profile service. In this case, the address is posted on the bchtech website. You have to transfer it on a flat surface because the machine only takes flat products. After bchtech receives the transfer sample, bchtech will have a beautiful woman or Kevin and depends on who's available to make an ICC profile and then send the profile back to you electronically. For the final step, after downloading the profile, we'll right-click on the profile and select install. Now with the customized profile installed, we can light a Photoshop to manage the colors. As paranoid as we are, we went into the printer's profile management to make sure we turn off the printer management. This is not necessary, but you'll know us. We just make sure that the printer is not going to touch them. You can see now we can say Photoshop managed colors and then from the drop-down, we select the customized ICC profile we just installed. Here's the result of using no profile and absence default ICC profile. We can see the default ICC is a little bit warmer because this fabric has yellow tint indoors. And then we made a customized ICC profile and you can see the color is more vibrant and accurate in the customized ICC profile. And to make this point strongly, we can put those two transfers next to the monitor, the calibrate monitor that we used. The middle one is the calibrate monitor and you can see on the right is the customized profile. On the left is the absence default. The absence generic ICC didn't count for the fabric being off-white and therefore the result is much warmer. I hope these suggestions will help you to make a better sublimation transfer. Visit us at www.bchtechnologies.com or locally at Greensboro, North Carolina. Thank you. Cheers.