Creating color separations of tshirt designs

[bizwizkid]

Hi there,

I have a client with about 65 tshirt dye styles. Tie-dyed, starburst pattern, acid wash - you name it - and each area of the tshirt has a unique color. i.e. a tie-dyed shirt has 4 colors say. My clients company lets customers pick the colors they want on their final shirt. They want a tool (non-flash so it can be used on Apple products) that allows users to visualize a rough representation of the shirts.

I have photos of all those shirts as well and have attached a few for illustration of this question.

What I'm trying to learn is can I use Photoshop (CS6) to separate out the colors in a shirt - even if it's something as wild as a tie-dyed shirt or other styles?

Also, do you know of any script that allows one to build a tshirt by selecting colors? Here's an example. dyenomite dot com slash Designer. This site does what I want on one hand but, they have a separate image for every color combination - literally tens of thousands of options. My problem is I have over 2000 colors a user can select from (the whole PANTONE palette).

It would be great I could somehow create a vector of each of the tshirt style areas (I'm definitely asking how I do this), put all the hex codes in for the 2000 colors and then the tool would color each of the vectored areas with the users selection.

Thank you very much in advance for any help you might be able to give. Happy holidays to you and yours as well!

Jerry

 

[chrisix]

on the example viewer, they only have about 50 colors...
what it looks like they did on dyenomite is:
take a photo of a dyed shirt, and trace the shape of every color...
looks like they did it with a magic wand with bad quality...
then they just filled in those shapes with every possible color combination
of every shirt design, so a lot of pictures....
this low quality work will only look decent with small images.

what i suggests is trying to change colors with gradient maps.

as for a tool, i dont know anything about programing,
but it looks like you have two options,
either a program which does the color changing in the program itself
or do all the color changes yourself and get a program to display all the combinations, like dyenomite.

the 2nd option looks easier to me


here is the coloring method example:
(i think gradient mapping gives the best results)
if you want to use this, i can show you how i did it