How the read is produced

The service infers how a design is attached to a garment from a photograph of the print and from your description of how it feels under a finger.

This is not a test.

Where a model is used, its only job is to report what can be seen on the photograph: whether there is a step at the edge of the design, whether the weave reads through the colour, whether the boundary is a continuous cut line, whether there is a fine spray pattern or a pale underbase, whether there is thread or a standing pile. The judgement itself, the wash limits and the durability ranges all come from a fixed table held on this site, which can be reviewed and does not change from one request to the next.

Three things are invisible to it and always will be:

• The ink formulation. Every one of the five methods covers a wide range of chemistries, and they do not behave identically.
• Whether curing or pressing was done properly. This is the single largest influence on how long a print lasts, and it leaves no visible trace on the finished garment.
• How the garment was washed and dried before it reached you. On a second-hand item this is often decisive and is entirely unknowable.

Every read carries these three, and any others that apply to the method in question. They are not a footnote. They are the reason durability is a range.

Reading a print depends heavily on the angle of the light and how close the lens got. When a photograph does not carry the evidence, the read ends without naming a method, tells you what it did see, and tells you what would settle it.

The service does not guess in order to produce an answer.

The reason is simple: washing a garment by the wrong method causes damage that cannot be undone. An unnecessary retake costs one photograph. A confident wrong answer can cost the garment.

Expected life is always given as a range of wash cycles. No specific number of washes is promised, ever. Where in a range a particular garment lands depends on the three unknowns above, on how it is washed from here, and on the cloth itself.

Transfer film and direct-to-garment printing are often the only viable route for short runs and full-colour images — without them a great deal of printed clothing would not exist at all. Ink cured into the fibre lasts longer in the wash. Both of those are true at once.

No method is described as inferior by this service, and there is no ranking, league table or colour scale running from good to bad anywhere in it.

A print that has cracked, crazed or lifted generally cannot be restored. The service says so directly rather than offering hope it cannot support.

What it offers instead is ways to slow the deterioration: cold water, inside out, gentle cycles, line drying, and keeping an iron away from the printed face.

It recommends no repair product, no detergent, no additive and no service provider.

The service evaluates no brand. It does not say which method a label tends to use, does not compare makers and does not comment on whether a garment was worth its price. Brand names that reach us in a description or off a photograph are masked before anything is stored, displayed or shared.

The service verifies no certification and interprets no certification. Whether a mark on a garment is genuine, and what its scheme covers, are outside what this does.

Reflecting the same rule in the terms: output from this service must not be used as a quality claim about any brand or product, as evidence in a return, refund, chargeback or complaint, or published as a statement of fact about a garment or the people who made it.

It must not be used for decisions in medical, legal, financial, safety, employment, credit, housing or judicial contexts.

Acceptable use policy · Terms of service

Photographs and descriptions you upload are not used to train any model. They are processed to produce your read, stored so that you can look at it again, and deleted when you delete them. The privacy notice sets out retention periods and how deletion works.

If a read looks wrong to you, write to us and a person will look at it. That is a real route, not a formality, and it is often how the local table gets improved.