Homemade Decal Colors Not Vibrant

[Oceaneer99]

Joe,

We have all struggled in one way or another with homemade decals.  As to color saturation, I experimented a lot with the printer driver paper settings, trying out matte, gloss, plain paper, and transparency settings to see what gave the best results.   I had a custom color setting that made the print look like what I had intended.  I got a new printer a while back and still haven't figured out the best setting, though I have gotten it to work adequately.  I had my old printer all figured out, and knew how to handle its shortcomings.

I also had problems with ragged edges on the printed decals.  I fixed this by going to a slower print quality setting that on prints when the print head is moving left-to-right.

I have also found the decal paper to be very fragile, but kept my clear coats to one light coat followed by a heavy coat.  If I need to print right to the edge, I sometimes cut out the decal, stick it to a piece of cardboard, and shoot the edges with clear coat.  This doesn't always work -- the ink still runs if I soak the decal too long -- but sometimes I've made it work.  Also, I found it very important to spray the model with lacquer after the decals have been applied.  I usually follow this up with two coats of Future.  I found that the Future directly over the decals can make the edge printing run.  Due to the fragility of the decal paper, I usually have to print a second set of decals to fix ones that have torn during application.

Garet

[dave_t]

When I printed on Testors clear decal paper with an HP Deskjet 842C printer, the colors were too transparent and a pronounced line pattern was visible on the markings. The black ink printed dark enough, but everything was a bit blurry on the edges. Not very professional looking on close inspection.

We may have to move this topic to the Markings and Decals board.

[Oceaneer99]

I have also had the problem with horizontal lines on my decals.  I was usually able to fix them with some combination of paper setting (gloss, matte, plain, transparency -- some settings use too much ink and I got a smeared mess), print resolution (on my Epson printer, I am more likely to get the lines at lower print quality), and making sure my print head was clean and not clogged. 

Testors clear decal paper does produce transparent decals.  Just as Dave noted, black areas are fairly transparent, but other colors show the paint colors below them.  I learned this when I was trying to put RAF roundels on my camouflage Spitfire.  My solution was to put a plain white decal cut to the correct size down first, hit it with a light mist of clear finish (so it doesn't come up) and put the clear-decal paper roundel down on top.  At some point, I'll have to make a sketch of this, but the point was to leave a small clear margin around the roudel edge so that the colors near the edge wouldn't run.