What you asked us:	Our Response:
Hello, we are interested in doing a story on personalizing coffee mugs in the Martha Stewart Living magazine. I was curious if it is possible to use any mug- for instance if I sent you a colored mug that I bought at a store, could you transfer an image onto it. We are looking for some more flexibility with color (i.e. not just a white mug) and are curious if that is possible. Thank you very much, Lauren Shields Craft Editor Martha Stewart Living magazine Thank you for your e-mail and interest in our full-color, custom-decorated, white, ceramic coffee mugs. Unfortunately we - and anyone else - can only decorate white coffee mugs if a good color reproduction is required that looks like the "real thing" with highlights, shadows and the full, printable color spectrum. Since digital printers used in the decorating process of our full-color sublimation decorations CANNOT print the color "white" (there is no such thing as a "white" color cartridge, for example), the color white is taken from the background, in our case the white, ceramic coffee mug or white-glazed ceramic tile. Since the color "white" (RGB values 255,255,255) does not exist in the digital image file as an actual color but rather as some sort of a  virtual "transparent" part of the digital image, any white color will become the color of whatever background the image is printed upon. Printed or applied to a red mug, for example, all parts that are "white" in your digital image will be seen as red, the red of the mug, and the overall tone of the image will also be perceived as "reddish" as no white surface is present to reflect the required "whiteness" of the image. Put another way, a nice yellow color on a white surface will be perceived as a nice yellow color; but when put on a red mug there is no yellow to be perceived as the red will "eat" the yellow, so to speak, and merge with it visually. Furthermore, all mugs (or any other hard surface) to be used with the sublimation full-color process require a special coating which accepts the color decoration per se. Of course, the color pigment inks used for this process are specially formulated (and rather expensive) and you cannot use your regular printer's inks. I bought a mug from GiftMugs a while back with a logo on the front and an inscription on the back.  The insciption dates the mug, and it was intended to be a prize for a contest that never ended up occurring.  How can I remove a small graphic from a frosted mug? Although our full-color sublimation coffee gift mugs decorations cannot withstand extremely high water temperatures and high-temperature air streams (like those, for example, found in commercial dish washers or those of the Bosch dishwasher brand), our coffee mug decorations are rather resistant under conditions we recommend, namely: To preserve the beauty and vibrancy of the image on our full-color sublimation-decorated mugs, it is best to hand wash them as you would hand wash any fine China as well as your best glasses. Also, never leave the mugs in direct sunlight, for example on a window sill. To "erase" our mug decorations on an entire coffee mug, just expose it to extremely high temperatures and air flows and some or all of the decoration should weaken, if not disappear over time. To only "erase" part of a decoration, you might want to tape-up the decoration you want to preserve and expose the decoration to be erased to direct sunlight. These methods may or may not yield the desired results, however as every color pigment is different as well as the special mug coating used in the sublimation decoration of all our coffee Gift Mugs. I'm confusing myself with pixels and dpi's in trying to figure out if my digital photos will work.  My picture has a width of 1280 pixels, height of 960 pixels, horizontal resolution of 72 dpi, and vertical resolution of 72 dpi.  It's saved as a jpeg file.  The size is 327KB (335,413 bytes).  If this size will work, would it be best to have the same photo on both sides, or have it as a wrap-around.  It's a picture of Mt. Rainier.  Thanks!   A digital image with a pixel count of 1,280 x 960 at a resolution of 72 dpi's results in a Pixel Dimension of ~3.52M which translates into a document size of ~17.78" x 13.33" (Example: 1,280/72 = 17.77; and 960/72 = 13.33). A digital image with a pixel count of 1,280 x 960 at a resolution of 300 dpi's results in a Pixel Dimension of also ~3.52M which translates in a document size of ~4.267" x 3.2" (Example: 1,280/300 = 4.267"; and 960/300 = 3.2"). In other words the Pixel Dimension is identical in both calculations and when the pixel count of each dimension is divided by the desired resolution, the final image dimensions can be determined. Hence, the information indicated in above two samples is of the very same digital image, only that the first is larger in dimensions but lower in resolution, and the second is smaller in dimensions but higher in resolution but the total "contents" of the image remains the same. Since we suggest a resolution of at least 300 dpi's, your digital image file will nicely fit as a single-sided mug decoration for our 15-oz coffee mugs. The max. dimensions for a single-sided, 15-oz mug decoration are: 3.5" x 3.5" while your digital image has a size of: 4.267" x 3.2"at a resolution of 300 dpi's. Thus your image can easily be cropped down to the desired dimensions of: 3.5" x 2.625" and still remain within the original proportional relationship, which is:1,33 to 1. Should you require a wrap-around mug decoration, your digital image would have to have a proportional relationship of: 2.37 to 1 (or 8.33" x 3.5"), and at a resolution of 300 dpi's the pixel count should be: 2,399 horizontal pixels by 1,050 vertical pixels. Based on this calculation, your digital image file cannot be used for a wrap-around decoration unless you "stitch" the same image twice into a single one, that is, have the same image shown side be side. As you can see the file format which, in your case is: .jpg does not matter when talking about dimensions or pixels, it only has to do with the fact that .jpg is a lossy compression method, while the .tif format is not compressed to the same extent and hence no real "loss" of image quality is produced when saving a digital image file in the .tif format. (By the way, the only format where all pixels are saved as actually seen by a digital camera is the 'Raw" format which some professional cameras offer for storing an image exactly as seen by the camera lens. Yet they produce far too large a file when saved with information most users never really need, at least not for the decoration of coffee mugs)
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