Life Behind A Lens

One of the things that I've noticed on my travels of Redbubble is the difficulty that some folk have formatting their t-shirt designs to the right size and make the background transparent. So I thought I'd write the simple method that I've used down to see if that helps..

So, here’s a quick tutorial on how to create a transparent template and how to save it as a PNG file (including dealing with compression) in GIMP.

Here goes then…

Creating a t-shirt template for working on

• To do this, open GIMP and go to File->New.
• In the options window that appears, set the image size to 2400×3200.
• Expand the advanced options and in the Fill With option select Transparency.
• Click OK.
• That’s it, you now have your t-shirt working space ready for your design.

Top Tip: It’s worth saving this empty image as Template.xcf and then you have a blank template for any future t-shirts that you might want to make!

Now you should be busy adding text and images to produce your groundbreaking and magnificent design. So I’m off for a cup of coffee and a smoke while you do that.

I’ll be back when you’re done to explain how to save it so that it looks right when you upload it as a t-shirt. Good luck with the design!

Okey.. I’m back.. How’s that design going? All done? Jolly good..

Saving your design so that it displays correctly

• First things first.. Save your design as an xcf file, in case you want to edit anything later on.. It may well be unnecessary, but better safe than sorry.

Top Tip: Remember to rename it something other than Template.xcf so that you don’t overwrite your blank working image!!

• Next, you want to save it as a PNG file.. So, goto File->Save As
• At the bottom of the dialogue box, expand the Select File Type (By Extension) option and choose PNG Image.
• Name your new image (if you haven’t already)
• Click Save.
• Assuming that you’ve been using layers in your design, you should now get a message window that says PNG Plug-in can’t handle layers
• Check the Merge Visible Layers radio button and click Export.
• Now you’ll have another dialogue box with some more options. The three that should be checked are: Save Background Colour, Save Resolution and Save Colour Values From Transparent Pixels. All the other are best left unchecked, just to keep it simple.
• Now we need to choose the compression level.. I always set my compression level to one. It doesn’t lose any detail that I can see at all and the image size is something like 2% of the same image set to a compression level of zero.

Note: For example, in my t-shirt design A Rampants’ Day Off a compression level of zero left me with a file size of 29.3Mb, but a compression level of one gave me a file size of 404kb

That’s it, all done. You are now ready to upload your groundbreaking and magnificent design to Redbubble!