Ghosting

Ghosting shows up two ways in a print shop: wet plastisol ink from a freshly printed shirt smears a faint mirror image onto the garment stacked against it before curing, or leftover residue in a poorly reclaimed screen prints a shadow of the previous job's art onto the next design. The first is a handling problem — shirts stacked or bagged before ink fully cures at 320°F pick up a light copy of whatever touched them; the second is a screen-prep problem where old ink was never fully stripped out of the mesh.

For the buyer, ghosting looks like a pale, blurry outline of a logo or number where there shouldn't be one — sometimes barely visible until the shirt catches light at an angle. We've caught it during quality control on a batch of jersey numbers, where the "7" from one shirt printed itself faintly onto the shirt underneath during the cure, and every one of those went back through the line.

Good shops prevent it by curing fully before stacking, using slip sheets or hang-drying racks between prints, and reclaiming screens completely — stripping emulsion and ink residue rather than just rinsing — before burning a new image. Buyers reviewing a delivered order should hold a shirt at an angle under bright light to check for it, especially on light-colored garments where faint ghosting is easiest to miss.

The mistake is assuming ghosting is permanent damage and rejecting the whole order — because it's usually a thin ink deposit rather than a dyed-in stain, a light wash will often lift it right off the fabric, so it's worth washing a flagged shirt once before writing it off.