It's never happened to me... maybe check your history and look for color filters or something that might have changed.

Compare the colors that pop up via the eye dropper and see if you might have just accidentally manually chosen a different color.

I've had that happen to me before too. It usually happens if I am using the water droplet tool (which is almost always). If I'm not paying attention while doing it, I may accidentally highlight where two colors meet. Although only a slightly different shade, it could be noticed by the Threadless community and denied. Sometimes it is so slight I don't catch it until I've finished a sub. Soooo what I'm really trying to say here is: maybe it's the water droplet tool. Be sure you are selecting an area where the color you want to use again is not touching any other colors. Hope this helped.

yes... I am am using the eye-droplet tool, more than likely that's probably the issue. Thanks for the advice david.

Try using color overlays and using the Pantone color system instead. Any color used on a shirt has to be a specific ink, CMYK and RGB don't work on shirts, so you might as well use whatever specific colors you intend on the shirt from the beginning

David solved the problem I was having, but this is a good suggestion JxE. I don't understand why CMYK wouldn't work--it is ink afterall. It is something at least to keep in mind whilst I figure out color configurations.

PMS color matching is THE WAY TO GO.

That way, you get the exact color & not a color that looks different on every computer screen. Ya dig?

surreal,

i came from a paper printing background, so when i got a job in the t-shirt industry, i was a little confused about the CMYK question, too. here it is in a nutshell...

CMYK is intended for offset printing on paper. It doesn't work very well on fabric. The inks that print on paper are translucent , while screenprinting inks are typically opaque. Also, the plates used in paper printing are created from film from an imagesetter that prints at about 2400 dpi or so - the screens used in t-shirt printing usually have a mesh count of 110 to 305 dpi. These bigger dots make it more difficult to create a decent CMYK image. Most "photographic" images you see on t-shirts are created with a minimum of 6-8 colors. We use a technique called "spot process" or "simulated process" to create the images.

I've seen some decent CMYK images printed on shirts, but it only works for certain images and ONLY on white shirts.

My advise would be to definately go with the PMS color matching. Also the ideal way to create artwork for screenprinting, is through a vector program (Illustrator or FreeHand). It makes your image much cleaner and easier to manage, plus color management is no problem at all. Vector is a bit trickier than PhotoShop, but once you learn the basics, you'll love it!

sorry for the long post. got on a roll...

Thanks hoppergrass, this has been very informative! I know how to use vector... I hated it at first, but now that I know some of the basics I see huge potential. My current design is in photoshop--at 200dpi would it work if I imported it into illustrator--resolution wise?

A PS file imported into AI does not instantly make it vector, you know. It's still considered a rastor file unless you completly redraw it in AI.

I have a feeling my deisign will get rejected. Is there only supposed to be four unique colors in the gif section when you save it to the web? I have numerous, but narrowed them down, just in case.