Realistic Color Mockups from Printify & Printful – CMYK Mockups

In this video we’re going to talk more about mock-ups if you haven’t seen any of my other videos about product mock-ups for your print on demand shop I will link to them in the description in this video we’re going to focus on a couple of things one is it important

Relatively new feature to both printify and printful mock-ups and then we’ll also talk about backgrounds for your mock-ups all right so hopefully the reason why I’m combining these two topics into a video will become clear in a moment first let’s talk about the feature that’s a recent Edition in both printify

And printful I think it’s newer in printify it’s been there for a little bit in printful and specifically what I’m talking about is the ability to preview Your Design mock-up in the CMYK color profile now for a long time on these platforms you would just upload

Your design in the srgb OR RGB color space because that’s what they recommended that you save your print files as and then your mock-ups would also display the colors in that same color profile but then in real life they actually get converted to CMYK when they’re printed on your products and

Sometimes especially if you have really bright vibrant colors in your designs that can look a little bit different when it’s converted to CMYK but there’s not really been an easy way for you to show what it will actually look like in your mock-ups until now because as I

Mentioned both printify and printful now let you view your mock up with your design converted into that CMYK color profile it is super easy for both of them we’ll look at printify first because I already have a design open here going to disappear for a second so

I can show you the menu on the right side of the screen what you’re looking for here once you’re in the preview view so this is not the edit view of the design editor this is the preview view where you can see your various mockups there’s now a section here where it says

Mock-up color mode and currently it is in the bright or colorful RGB mode and if we change this to realistic so there we go it may not be immediately obvious what the difference was but you can toggle back and forth between them to see the difference and in this case you

Can see both the blue and the reds are a little bit more dull and subdued in the realistic or CMYK profile so if we leave this selected as realistic here then when we publish this to our store these mock-ups are going to come through looking like this which is more

Realistic so this is a great option that I’m really happy to see that printify has now because now with this option you can also view them in CMYK and then download them to still add your own backgrounds but they’ll have a more accurate color profile in your mock-ups

And I do still recommend doing that that is the second topic we’re going to touch on in this video and we’ll come back to printify to talk about something in just a second but first let me just point out how you do this in printful so this is

Your design editing view part of the workflow when you select a product and then you upload your print file to select your print file to place on it again this is going to be towards the right side of the screen so what we’ve got here is the the little placements

Menu but underneath that underneath that little menu you’ve you’ve got this little kind of looks like an ink drop and when you click on that it gives you this little pop-up that says what your print will look like and if you toggle the switch that says show adjusted

Mock-up you will see the colors change and let me actually if I zoom in on it it’ll be even more obvious there you go so as you can see this design has a lot of vibrant colors in it and if we toggle that that on it’s going to make them

Look a little bit more dull which will be a better more accurate representation of how that will get printed and if you enable that it will carry through to the mock-ups that you create on printful as well so that’s that feature I wanted to show you on both printify and printful

Super easy you just need to know where to look to find it but this opens the door to a conversation about mock-up backgrounds because if you want to do this you really have two choices as far as what to do about your mock-ups in general now because remember we still

Uploaded our print file in the RGB or srgb color profile to our platform because they still recommend that they still recommend in their help articles I’ll link to them in the description case you want confirmation both printify and printful still recommend you upload your print files in the RGB color space

Because their platforms are built to handle that they’re expecting to convert from RGB to CMYK that of course means your print file will be in RGB even though you’ll have mock-ups that are more representative of CMYK and that can kind of complicate things from a mock-up standpoint especially if you add your

Own backgrounds to the mock-ups that your platform provides or if you create mock-ups somewhere else like place it because previously what you would probably be doing is taking your print file like the one you actually used just uploading it to a service like place it and then creating your mock-ups and

Those mock-ups are going to show your image in the RGB color profile because that’s what your print file is I hope that made sense basically if you’re using only your own mock-ups and that’s what you’re going to keep doing you’re only going to use placeit or whatever mockups you’re creating you can just

Keep doing what you’ve been doing that’s not a problem but if you want to use at least some of the mock-ups that printifier printful provides and you want to start using this new feature that’s where you have to pay attention to the color profile in the mock-ups that you are creating separately because

You want them to match so in order to get them to match basically you just need to have a separate print file that’s also in the CMYK color profile that you can use with play sitter or whatever method you’re using to create your own mock-ups because that will more

Closely match any mock-ups you’re taking from printify or printful and using in your listing if that sounds like too much then you kind of have a decision to make either use only your own mock-ups and none of these or use only these mock-ups and none of your own because

Either way then that would save you from having to you know save two print files and that brings us to the real second topic of this video which is mock-up backgrounds because if your decision is to simplify things and not do separately created mock-ups and use the ones that

Your platform creates because now you can display them in the correct color profile we still need to talk about those backgrounds because a lot of the mock-ups available both on printful and printify are these plain white background mock-ups which just don’t really do anything to make your shop look professional or differentiate your

Shop from the countless other shops that just use a plain white background they have gotten a little better in the last maybe a year or so as you can see on printify there’s a couple that look more like this where there’s some context is not just a plain white background but

The majority are still a plain white background so let’s talk a little bit about those backgrounds there really isn’t a wrong way to make your backgrounds or to add your backgrounds there’s really just whatever way is most efficient for you because doing this every time can certainly you know take a

Bit of your time if you’re using printify there are two options one is to upload a background directly into printify here in the preview viewer and that is in the bottom right corner of the right side menu so as we scroll down you’ll see a mock-up background and

Anything I have previously uploaded is showing here already but you can also click on add new image to upload your own and they recommend the dimensions of 2048 by 2048 pixels so that would be the size you would create with any background you want to upload this

Option may not be available for every product in the catalog but for your major apparel products I know it is here I believe it’s also here for mugs so this is going to be an option for most products and I think they’re still expanding it but for example if we add

The one that I have created to be the T-shirt background here and now there we go now this is not the best background color to use for white t-shirts so if you’re selling your design on a white T-shirt you may want to pick a darker background than this obviously to get

Better contrast but you can very easily use any editing software like canva or Kittle or photoshop to create one of these background files you can put your shop logo on it and then you’ll have a nice background and you don’t have to do anything outside of printify if you use

This option which is nice because they’ll publish right to your store just like this so if this works for you this is a nice option that I think it saves you quite a few clicks and also for the mock-ups where it is a person you can separately select as you can see the

Front mock-up the lay flat mock up here that’s the only one that it applied that background to it doesn’t apply them to all so you can change the mock-ups individually so if we look at this one of a person that I might want to use I can add a different background to that

And I got a nice image of sort of a living room background scene that I’ve used for some of my individual person ones all I did for those was come over to canva click on create a design in the top right click on custom size there and

Then enter your size that you want now remember printify recommended 2048 by 2048 so that’s what I’m going to click there and then all I did here was I went to the photos option in the left menu and then I put in a search for living

Room and then you get all of these pictures to select from a living room scene and all you have to do then is fill out your canvas and then from there I would just recommend adding a little bit of blur because remember this is going to be in the background and you

Want some separation you don’t want to look too strange so if you click on edit photo here in the corner and then go down to the effects and then click on blur you’ll be able to use the little slider there to adjust how much blur you’ve got in the background so you

Don’t want it to be like so blurry you can’t tell what it is but just add a little bit of blur I’m going to stick at about 25 percent now if I downloaded this I could upload this as a new background to use for these mock-ups here on printify so you can create

Several variations and then find you know a couple that work the best for you either for lay flat or for these is a person mock-ups and then you can just have a nice pre-made set like I said they stay here in your printify account after you’ve uploaded them so you don’t

Have to worry about doing this every single time and then you’ll have nice consistent mock-ups with a background that published straight to your shop from printify and to me that’s a pretty efficient process printful also has a custom mock-up creation workflow where you can add backgrounds directly on the

Platform and then publish them with your listing now I’m going to use a product template here to show you this but this is also something you can do in your product creation workflow or when you create a new product template so if I click on download mockups here on an

Existing product template this is the these are the two options that you get you get basic mock-ups and custom mock-ups so if we click on create your own this takes us to the mock-up creation tool and on printful they actually already have a bunch of backgrounds even props and stuff

Pre-loaded now they also have scenes that are pre-created so for example over here in your left side of the menu you have a whole bunch these are all just pre-made backgrounds that you can add so I’m going to click on one one with a wood background and a couple of props

Here so if I like this one I can click on select and continue and then it brings me to in basically another editor view where I can move around these props these plants I can resize them I can move them around I can do pretty much

Anything I want with this as if I was editing it like on canva or in the design editor view I can also add my own uploads here so if I wanted to add my shop logo or if I wanted to add text all of those options are over here in the

Left side of the menu you can also replace you know props if there’s a specific one you wanted to add to your mock-ups before you proceed you can also rearrange layers you can do a lot with this custom mock-up creation tool which can be dangerous this is not something

That you want to spend like an hour doing for one mock-up for one product but at the same time it is nice to have all these options if printful is your platform from there you just continue and if you were in the creation workflow where you’re making a listing it would

Just push you to the next stage but because I clicked on an existing product template this was just basically making new mock-ups and so it takes me to a screen to download what I create created so you can do this after you’ve created a product or you can do it during the

Product creation workflow however it’s not the only process it’s not the only option out there there are definitely other ways to add backgrounds to your mock-ups let’s take a look at two that take advantage of AI one would be for Kittle users if you use Kittle to create your designs or even your

Mock-ups because they do have mock-ups now you can use the AI background tool in Kittle which you can find if you go to the AI tools menu in the top part of the screen here and then go to the first option AI product backgrounds all you

Have to do is upload an image of your product and then put in a couple of prompts and you can get a background generated so for example if I upload an image of that shirt it will automatically wipe the background from around the product if there already is

One so it takes a second and there it goes so now it’s got a transparent background and you can choose between the scene options or you can put in your own prompt so the scene options are all pretty basic so for this one I’m going

To go back to scene and I’m just going to go to materials and click on wood and then click on generate background and we’ll see what we get now it’ll bring us down below here you can see I already tested this out on a mug and I’ve got

Some a couple of pretty usable rest results here with that mug that I tested it with and there we go and unfortunately we have kind of a not so good result here I selected wood here as the material up there and it’s somehow managed to deliver a mock-up with a fake

Cement brick background here’s one of the downsides of using these AI tools I’m actually glad that this happened because I did want to point out I have found that some of these tools that are newer especially they’re not always super accurate and at the times I’ve

Tried to use them sometimes you get a really nice usable result like for example one of these mugs this to me perfectly usable result this was a plain white background mock-up that I downloaded from printify of this mug that whole background it was it was AI generated on Kittle however this

Background is not even close to the prompt that I put in and on the second time around it did generate a wood surface but it’s not really a color that I’m in love with I just I’d prefer something looking a little bit different so this is why I personally really don’t

Yet use AI tools to generate all of my backgrounds I test it here and there to see like how good it is if I have the time but when I’m like really head down in a workflow of trying to crank out a few new listings I personally don’t use

These AI tools at least not yet now I’m not saying don’t use these yourself I’m not saying I don’t recommend them at all I’m just saying you know be conscious of the time you’re spending if you run into something like this I would probably bail on it and go back to like the

Traditional way of creating your mock-ups which would just be you know go to canva search for an image and then pick one you like I personally sometimes that’s still faster but to give AI the benefit of the doubt let’s try another tool now this one you would have had to

Have paid for Photoshop to be able to get this this is the Adobe Photoshop beta version which actually has all the the generative fill tool and the the Eraser that’s AI based so let’s test this out and see how this does doing the exact same thing so I have a blank file

Here that is 2048 by 2048 and I’m going to bring in that same mock-up all right so I’m just going to to resize that to fill out the entire canvas area now instead of doing the thing that I always used to do in Photoshop which was to

Select you know the white area with one of the selection tools and then manually delete it right below that on the little hover menu I actually have an option here that says remove background so I’m just going to do that so we’ll click on that and then literally like that was

Less than a second it took to delete the background so now what I need to do is I need to actually select the open area here in order to use the fill tool so what I’m going to do is just hold down my command which you would do hold down

Control on Windows and then click on the image of the layer over to the right in the layer menu that will select that layer and then I’m going to get generative fill here so I’m going to click on generative fill and it’s going to give me the little window for a

Prompt and I’m going to say wooden surface and I’m just going to click generate because I want to try and keep this as simple as possible so we’ll see how well this does with minimal information to work with so there we go it actually created a wooden surface

Which looks pretty realistic and it is above love it’s on top of my design layer so I’m not just going to grab my design layer here and drag it up and then on your right menu it actually even gives you variation so I can select these three different options that it

Gave me based on that first prompt so there we go that’s it it was that fast and easy just a couple of clicks I may have even done it less efficiently than possible there’s there may be a way to save a couple of those Clicks in there

This may not be a bad option you could probably get a little bit more complex with your prompt when these are more accurate one of the reasons they can save you time is because instead of like going and searching on canva or on pixels or pixabay for a different

Background like if maybe I just needed a different color wood or something for this this file that I’m working with I don’t have to go search for that I can just use generative fill and say I need a darker color wood and it will just

Fill it in for you I find this to be fairly accurate so if you are a Photoshop user if you already paid for Photoshop this could be a pretty quick way to add some backgrounds to your mock-ups and you don’t have to do this every time because you can still save

This this PSD file file as a template if it generated a background you really like you can still throw your shop logo on the layer and then just you know add your new mock-up for each design that you create and then export them that way so you don’t have to go through the

Generation process every single time and that’s really it for this video I just wanted to talk about that feature for viewing your design in CMYK for your mock-ups and then if you want to use that going about creating your backgrounds for your mock-ups there

Really isn’t a wrong way to do it like I mentioned it’s just a matter of figuring out what’s most efficient for you so I hope this was helpful for you let me know down in the comments if you have any questions about any of these things

That we talked about in this video and also if you want to share any tips about your mock-up creation workflow with everybody else to do that in the comments as well thanks everybody see you next time