Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. - Thomas Edison
Whats your trap?Squeegee selection?pressure?flash time?Mesh tension?etc...I see lots of fibers coming through the print. That will kill opacity and make the print rough.
I'd like to know some of the questions Colin asked, most importantly what mesh counts are you running for everything, especially the UB. Squeegee blades are important in that they need to be sharp and a fairly soft duro, then work on printing the base as fast as possible. That will increase your opacity more than any other factor if the other parts of the system are solid. If you're using standard mesh counts then do yourself a favor and throw them away, for this type of printing it's especially important to print fast and thin thread allows you to do that. Standard mesh counts don't have the open area and restrict shearing speed to a joke.
Also, when dealing with transparent color shades - and some orange inks/pms colors are much more transparent than we want - you will need to bite the bullet and do whats needed for a brighter under base...
I'd also second the roller/smoothing screen if you're not currently using one. And for certain top colors (like the ones in your photo), we often run either a PFP base or PFP 225S top (the latter offering a thinner final print) if that's what it takes to get the print to our standard.
I've been a manual shop up until recently so everything we did was generally a pfpf. I'll probably do the same on the auto, but all the jobs on it so far have been 1 color on cotton so we'll see.
That's three votes for “certain colors” it's damn hard to do.Anyone out there want to pipe up to claim that they consistently print:large open area UB that is opaque enoughonce around the press to properly support harder top colors (gold/yellow/orange)?Our main local school's colors are Black/Orange/White so this is something that would pay dividends to learn how to do repeatably.