Printing With White Ink

Mint Tins: The color white (#FFFFFF) is not printed on mint tins. Any other shade of white will be printed.  Anything you wish to have printed will need to be a color other than pure white (otherwise, it will show the silver of the tin).

Foil Booster Packs and Foil Cards: No white ink is printed on booster packs at all, not even shades of white. Anything you wish to have printed will need to be a color other than white (otherwise, it will show the silver of the booster pack).

Our printer’s software generates a white underlayer for you based on the pixel information of your image.

If you intend to use gradients to have your images transition to the clear plastic on your items it will not work. All pixels are treated as full color when the base white layer is applied. This means that regardless of the shade or opacity of the pixel a white layer will be below it before the color is applied. This means you will have large white areas instead of a gradient. 

Example of an image with gradients that the designer wanted to go to clear.

How these images printed.

 Most importantly, our printer’s software ignores pixels that are 100% white (hex code #FFFFFF) and will not generate white ink at those pixels. This is great for backgrounds that you don’t want to be printed but gives bad results if any part of the image you actually want printed is 100% white, like a bright highlight or a star, since the printer won't print anything there. See a tutorial below for getting rid of hidden white pixels, that might be causing you trouble.

What this means is that you can slightly darken your white pixels to 99% or less and white ink information will be generated there as intended (for items other than booster packs). 

Here you can see how the white code looks in a submitted image and how it is printed on the Mint Tin.

The image submitted here is a transparent .PNG image.

Here is a transparent .PNG image where the white code is not pure white and the white is printed on the Mint Tin.

Here is an example of what can happen when you load an image with pure white and how it will print on the Mint Tin.

Avoiding hidden white pixels in your art

Sometimes in your illustrations, there may be some pure white pixels that you are not aware of, like in this icon:

Here is a quick way to cover all the white in your image, to make sure the entire image, including the white of the image, prints, without effecting the transparent parts of your image.

Step One:
Open your image in your image editor of choice. The image editor should have layers, and a mask tool.

Step Two:
Great a solid black layer above your image.

Step Three:
Make the black layer a mask. You may need to check how your specific program does this. In Photoshop, you can alt click the line between the layers, or right click the black layer and select "Create Clipping Mask". You can instead duplicate your image layer, lock its opacity, and color the whole image black. Your end result should be two layers, one that is black and the shape of your illustration, and the other is your illustration. 

Mask:

Locking Opacity:

Step Four:
Set the black layer to Multiply, and its opacity to 1%. This will slightly darken your image, turning all pure white pixels into an off white, without effecting the overall color of your image.

Step Five:
Save your Image as a PNG, you are good to go.

Anti-Alias and why not to use it

It most raster image editors, they are set to save (or the tools are set to use) anti-aliasing. This gives a nice soft edge which looks nice in general, however when printing with components that have a white underlayer (like dice, meeples, tins and acrylic) the white underneath will appear on the edges where the image is fuzzy. This gives your image a white outline. 

Here, we are proofing a circle with anti-aliasing on:

Here is one with the anti-aliasing off:

Turning off anti-aliasing will depend on the software you are using, however as an example, when using a program like Illustrator, you would export as a PNG and when saving, select "None". 

In programs like Photoshop, you'd need to turn off anti-aliasing on each tool you use. If you are not sure how to do this in the image editor you are using, you'll need to search online, or reach out to that company's customer service.