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DTF Print Readiness
Color Swap

Color Swap — changing a color in your artwork

Pick a color on your image, widen the match until it covers the shading you mean, choose what it becomes, and see it live. The shape of your print never changes, so neither does its price.

01

What a color swap changes — and what it never does

A swap changes the color of pixels and nothing else. Every pixel keeps exactly the transparency it had, so the outline of your print, the white underbase the press lays beneath it, and the area you are billed for are all untouched. A red logo becomes a navy logo of the same shape.

It also works on pixel images only — PNG, JPEG and WebP. A vector file (SVG, or a design you vectorized here) changes color with Edit Vector instead, where every color is already a shape.

02

Picking the color

Palette and eyedropper

The tool reads the colors in your artwork and lists them with the most common first, so the background and the main fills are the first chips you see. Codec noise and the blended pixels along edges are folded into their neighbours rather than shown as a hundred near-identical chips. You can also click straight on the image with the eyedropper; the pick snaps to the nearest chip so a single noisy pixel never becomes the key.

03

Tolerance — how much counts as that color

One slider decides how far from the picked color a pixel can be and still change. It measures color the way your eye does, so the same setting feels the same on a pale yellow and a dark navy. Narrow it for a flat logo color; widen it so a shaded or textured area travels together. The dashed outline on the canvas shows exactly what is selected as you drag.

Shading survives

A darker shade of the picked color becomes an equally darker shade of the new one; highlights stay highlights. When the new color is much lighter or darker than the old one, the shading is compressed into the room that is left rather than clipped to flat black or white.

04

Edges stay clean

Anti-aliasing

The pixels along a curve or a corner are mixtures of the color inside and the color outside. A swap moves each of those pixels partway, in proportion to how much of the old color it held, so the edge becomes a blend of the new color and its neighbour instead of a halo of the old one. Transparency along the edge is left exactly as it was, which is what keeps the press film crisp.

05

The workflow — three steps

In the studio
1

Pick the color to change

Tap a chip or use the eyedropper, then set the tolerance until the dashed outline wraps what you mean.

Step 1
2

Choose the new color

A preset, a hex value, or the color wheel — or Transparent, which removes the color instead. The canvas shows the result live; flip the compare switch under the canvas to see before and after. Removing a color can change the shape of your print, so the confirm step shows the price before you apply.

Step 2
3

Add another color, or apply

Stage as many swaps as you need — undo, redo and reset are there while you work. Apply renders the full-resolution file in your browser, shows it at once, and saves it as the new version of your artwork.

Step 3
06

What to expect on press

Real world

Pure white prints as white ink. A near-white target snaps to pure white so it does not print as a faint haze under the white layer.

Very bright or neon targets print as the closest color the press can reach — what you see on screen is the nearest match, not a promise of fluorescence.

Your original file is kept untouched. A swap is a new version; you can revert to the original at any time.

Very large files on an iPad or iPhone may need a desktop browser to apply — the tool tells you if so.

07

Color Swap FAQ

Does swapping a color change my price?

No. Pricing follows the shape of your print, and a swap changes only colors — never transparency, size or shape.

Can I change more than one color?

Yes. Stage each change with Add another color; they apply in order as one new version of your artwork.

Why does part of a gradient not change?

The tolerance was narrower than the gradient. Widen the slider until the dashed outline covers the range you want, or stage a second swap for the rest.

Can you change a color for me instead?

Changing a color is a studio tool you run yourself. Our art team fixes print problems — edges, transparency, resolution — in the artwork you bring.

Swap a color in your artwork

Open Color Swap on any PNG or JPEG — pick the color, pick the new one, and see it live on the canvas before you apply.

Analyze my artwork →
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