Why customize Environments?
As you develop experience printing a wide variety of images on your FreeJet 330TX-series printer, you will eventually come across fabrics or designs that require modifying the default parameters provided by the built-in DirectRIP Environments.
Some of the easily adjustable parameters that get set to specific default values based on your Environment selection for a particular shirt color and type of fabric (for the 330TX Plus) include:
- Underbase
- Highlight
- Fuzziness
- Color Strength
- Color Booster
These and other settings can be quickly adjusted on the fly from the DirectRIP toolbar after loading your selected Environment (with its presets), and that’s the best way to make a fast, one-off adjustment.
In the below video and the following text, we’ll show you how to create and save a modified Environment, customized to your parameter preferences, which can improve your workflow & efficiency if you frequently use fabrics or designs that look best with modified settings.
Video Example
DirectRIP Environment Groups
Before we create a custom Environment, it will be helpful to understand how DirectRIP’s Environment Groups feature helps us keep Environments organized and easy to locate.
Environment Groups are like folders used to organize a set of Environments under a common category or theme. Whenever you click on DirectRIP’s Environment dropdown list to select an Environment, the bolded labels that are expanded to show Environments nested under them are the Environment Group names. For example, “Freejet 330 TX Production Mode” and “FreeJet 330TX Plus TX Quality mode” are a couple of Environment Groups found in DirectRIP for those respective FreeJet models.
Creating an Environment Group
We recommend creating new Environment Groups to organize any custom Environments you create. You may want Group names based on a client name or a particular brand & model of shirt — whatever makes sense to you when you’re later looking for a particular customized Environment (or set of custom Environments) is fine.
Here’s how to create an Environment Group.
- Click on the folder icon to the right of the DirectRIP toolbar’s Environment dropdown list.
The Manage Environment Group window will appear. - Click on the Add Environment group icon, as shown below.
A new Group will appear at the bottom of the Environment list with an initial name of “Group 1“.
- Click on the ‘Group 1‘ new group name, type whatever name you want to call the group, then press the Enter key. For this example, we use the name ‘Customized Envs‘.
The new Group name appears at the bottom of both lists. - Click the green checkmark near the bottom right corner of the Manage Environment Group window to save the new Group and close the window. The new Group now appears in the Environment tool’s dropdown list.
Saving a New Environment
Whenever we change the Underbase, Highlight, Fuzziness, Color Strength, or Color Booster values on the toolbar, we temporarily replace the values from the selected Environment’s default settings.
Here’s how to save a set of modified values to a new Environment.
- Select the appropriate Environment for your printer model, fabric color, and (for the FreeJet 330TX Plus) fabric type. This will provide the basis or starting point for your new Environment.
For this example, we use the FreeJet 330TX Plus TX Quality mode Environment Group’s Dark Cotton QM Environment. Its presets appear on the toolbar shown below.
- Use the DirectRIP toolbar to adjust the Underbase, Highlight, Fuzziness, Color Strength, or Color Booster values as desired. For this example, we will change the Highlight from 60% to 65%, the Fuzziness from 0 to 15, and the Color Strength from 45% to 55%.
We’ve so far created an Environment Group and made some changes to a set of default Environment parameters to create some context for what comes next.
The following steps will result in these parameter changes being saved to a new Environment which we’ll later be able to recall from the DirectRIP toolbar’s Environment dropdown. - Click the Print Setup icon at the bottom of the Q Rip window or near the left end of the DirectRIP toolbar. (Both icons do the same thing.)
The Print Setup window appears. - Click the Save Environment button (see below), the last icon to the right of the Print Setup window’s Environment dropdown list.
A Save As dialog window appears with the default name of “New Environment.env” in the File name text box. - Replace the default name with a name of your choice for the new Environment in the File name text box, then click the Save button.
We’re using “Modified Dark Cotton QM” in our example. - When the Save As dialog box closes, click the Print Setup window’s ‘OK’ button to close that window, too.
- Click the globe & wrench icon next to the DirectRIP main toolbar’s Environment dropdown list.
The Manage Environment window appears.
Scroll to the bottom of the Manage Environment window’s list where you will find an entry with no Environment Name and no Environment Group. This is the Environment that you created. - Click on the empty Environment Name field and type in a name for the new Environment.
The name you create here will appear when you use the toolbar’s Environment dropdown list in the future, so name your new Environment in a way that will be meaningful to you next time you want to use the same set of parameters. We’re using “Modified Dark Cotton QM” again for our example, but you’ll want to use something more specific to why you’re creating a custom Environment. - Click on the empty Environment Group field, then click on the dropdown box and select the new group name you previously created, or whatever Group you want the new Environment to be organized under.
- Click the green checkmark to save your selections.
You’re finished with the process and your new Environment is now available from the DirectRIP toolbar’s Environment dropdown list, located under the heading of your selected Environment Group.
