Printing With White Ink
Printing with white ink on non-paper based items is not as straightforward as it might seem.
When using our service for items like Custom-printed Meeples, Clear Cards, Dice, Acrylic, Foil Cards and Mint Tins, you will need to use a shade of white other than pure white (#FFFFFF). If you use pure white in your image, no color will be printed where the white is, and the underlying color of the component will show through in that section.
Booster Packs cannot be printed with any shade of white at all.
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: 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).
A note on .PNG transparency: files you submit to The Game Crafter are in .PNG format which supports transparency information. Pixels that are 100% transparent in your .PNG file are read as 100% white pixels when our printer software loads your image, so for the sake of this article 100% transparent is the same as 100% white.
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.
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.
