We Hacked A Premium Print Effect (The Foil Hack)

The Secret To Holographic Prints – We Hacked A Premium Print Effect

You do not always need to buy brand new equipment to create world-class print embellishments. 🛑💡

If you are a print service provider, graphic designer, or packaging nerd, stop scrolling.

We just accidentally hacked a premium metallic foil effect using gear we already had on the floor.

We recently saw an INCREDIBLE software-driven metallic system online. It is a top-tier solution that creates flawless, industry-leading metallic effects using special white ink and dedicated color mapping. 📈

But we love a good challenge in the shop. We wanted to see if we could achieve a SIMILAR jaw-dropping holographic look manually as a scrappy alternative for smaller runs or shops with limited gear. 🕵️‍♂️🛠️

Our first few attempts were okay but honestly lacked that vibrant pop. We tried printing white toner on silver foil and blocking out the shine. It worked, but the colors were just muddy and dull. 🤷‍♂️

Then we made a happy accident with our laminator that changed the game forever. 🚨

We discovered that if you take a standard holographic foil sheet and cover it with soft touch lamination, it completely mutes the shine. BUT when you drop raised clear MGI varnish OVER that lamination… the holographic foil underneath explodes through like a literal window. 🤯🌈

NO dedicated software required. NO special white toner needed. Just pure print hacker ingenuity combining lamination and varnish to create a multi-dimensional masterpiece. 🏆

We created posters of astronauts, dragons, and superheroes that physically change color when you move them in the light. While high-end proprietary systems are still the undisputed kings of this process, our scrappy hack proved you can create absolute magic with the tools you already own. 🔥

A massive shoutout to Taktiful for sponsoring this video! 🙌

If you are serious about mastering digital embellishments, you NEED to check out their brand new platform. It is the ultimate dedicated ecosystem for the business of digital embellishment, bringing together print service providers, designers, and industry experts. 🧠🚀

Ready to level up your print game and connect with the best in the business? Sign up for the community today at http://taktisphere.com

FULL TRANSCRIPT (AI-GENERATED):

[00:00:00] Adrian: Am I shining? Yeah.

[00:00:20] Eddie: Hey, guys. Welcome back to another bigDAWGS Challenge video. Today’s I have something really cool for you guys. I was up last night, and I saw this post from Mark Geeves. Have you guys heard of Color Logic?

[00:00:33] Karan: Mm. I’ve heard of it, but I’m not sure what it is.

[00:00:36] Eddie: It’s this cool system where you can achieve these cool metallic-like effects.

It’s a different kind of embellishments. And let me just show you this post here. So this is one of the posts, and these posts is what they’re giving out at, uh, Print United 2025. You see how the armor- Yeah,

[00:00:54] Karan: yeah …

[00:00:54] Eddie: glimmers? That’s

[00:00:55] Karan: cool. Yeah.

[00:00:56] Eddie: Uh, the part of the flag g- glimmers in holographic effects, metallic effects, even the sky and- Is it

[00:01:02] Karan: printed on, like, holographic foil sheet, like a substrate?

[00:01:06] Eddie: So the way I understand the system is that you buy into this, uh, color swatch system and these scripts in Photoshop and, uh, Adobe, uh, software and it automatically controls white toner.

[00:01:21] Karan: Mm.

[00:01:21] Eddie: Why is that important? Well, you print on top of a metallic substrate. So you buy, basically, special cardboard with, uh, a metallic surface.

In this case, it’s a holographic metallic surface. Mm. Lay white on top of it, and then lay color on top of it. But you control the density of the white to allow different, uh, variances of shine coming through the top of the toner. So that’s how- Mm … they’re able to control what is livid holographic metallic and what isn’t.

So if you notice in the video, some of these parts, like the flag and the armor, do glimmer when you, in the light, when you, um, reflect it. But stuff like the skin tones, see how it doesn’t? There’s no metallic effects. Yeah. That’s because there’s- Yeah,

[00:02:06] Karan: yeah …

[00:02:06] Eddie: there’s white, a lot of white, 100% white probably behind it.

And I thought this is a really cool system. Uh, it’s an expensive system though, so I wanna see if you guys can do it manually and… Well, first, can you do it, and how hard is it?

[00:02:23] Adrian: Yeah, don’t we have a printer that can print white toner?

[00:02:27] Karan: Oh, yeah. You’re talking about OKI. I think we can use OKI. Um, I know it’s a small printer.

It’s not a production printer, but let’s give it a shot. Yeah. And that’s the challenge.

[00:02:41] Adrian: All right, guys. So we saw the video that Ed showed us. We have the OKI printer. Uh, we’re gonna have Karan here explain some of the process we’re gonna do.

[00:02:51] Karan: All right. So what we’re gonna try is we have these media. The way we make this media is we print a black toner with u- we’re using Hanukkah here, and then we have a sleeking, like, a foil machine.

So we do sleeking to print, like, a foil on these sheets, and that’s how we get this metallic silver shiny media. So we’re gonna use OKI, um, to put white toner to block off the metallic finish, and then we’re gonna print on top of it with the colors s- so that those colors will have more metallic finish to it.

So the way we’re gonna control it is how much white we put underneath. So you put less white to reveal more metallic-ness of the art. The next step is to do the prepress, and we’re gonna make us two separate files. One is how m- where we wanna have the white color, and the second file would be where we’re gonna have the prints, which is, like, most of the part.

Um, so let’s start.

[00:03:45] Adrian: Yeah. All right. Look at that, guys. So we’re right about our theory. Everything that doesn’t have white on it should have a metallic glow when we print color on top. So let’s print the color part. We printed white on the OKI, and then we printed color on top. Uh, the top one is the version with the mostly flooded white.

[00:04:09] Karan: Yes.

[00:04:09] Adrian: And then this bottom one is, uh, minimal white.

[00:04:13] Karan: So I think, uh, our theories- Correct. Um, because the one that has less white, it, the picture itself looks more like shininess. Like, you can see the, the silver- Yeah. It’s more reflective … foil coming

[00:04:25] Adrian: through it. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, like, more revealing this one. Um, this one looks a bit darker.

It, it doesn’t have that metallic finishing. It looks a bit, like- Yeah … um, less

[00:04:36] Karan: metallicy. So it’s, it doesn’t look as appealing as the one that we saw in the video that Edgar was showing us. Um, I feel like it’s, it’s also, like, the, the color quality of the OKI is not as good and vibrant as the one that we have with Konica. Yeah,

[00:04:53] Adrian: that’s true.

[00:04:54] Karan: I wonder if you can do something in Konica to have, like, that more color depth to it.

[00:05:01] Eddie: Mm. But first, a word from our sponsor.

[00:05:04] Adrian: Oh, the honeymoon phase, where you love your embellishment machine more than anything else. Isn’t it shiny? Isn’t it beautiful? But what does your team think about this new machine? I’m sure they love it. I think this new machine is a profit drain. I think this machine is defective.

I just want foil on the logo. Why does it keep putting foil on the entire page? None of the salespeople know how to sell prints with embellishment. Probably time for an intervention. Welcome to Tactusphere, a dedicated ecosystem for the business of digital embellishment. Also, the collective intelligence of many people from the industry, from print service providers to graphic designers to OEMs.

You gain access to exclusive educational content, including expert articles, how-to guides, case studies, and interviews with industry leaders. Get real answers from real people who have been in the industry for many years. Be part of a community of embellishment experts. Join Tactusphere.

Hi, guys. I was going around, uh, to see what kind of materials we can work with to replicate the stuff that we saw in that video, and I passed by this by the lam machine. And what it is is the silver sheets that we worked with yesterday laminated with soft touch lamination. And I think production thought that it would be like a spare sheet that, uh, they run through the machine after the print so that the machine doesn’t stick on the lam.

And the interesting thing to note is that it… You see this part? Like, this is where the lam isn’t touching.

[00:07:06] Karan: Yeah.

[00:07:06] Adrian: So you still see the silver sheet, but the lam kind of cancels it, right? That’s

[00:07:10] Karan: interesting.

[00:07:11] Adrian: Almost like an off-white. And my hands were wet when I was, uh, picking it up, so all the spots that were wet, it looks like it cancels- Oh, yeah

out the, the lamination.

[00:07:22] Karan: That’s actually interesting because if a water can cancels out the, the lamination effects and you can see through the foil underneath, um, I wonder if you run it through Konica and how the toner will react to this, the, this lamination.

[00:07:39] Adrian: Let’s, let’s go find out.

[00:07:40] Karan: Yeah. Let’s, let’s try it.

[00:07:41] Adrian: Yeah.

[00:07:42] Karan: All right, so we’re gonna print the test print. Um, we already have the print test file and loaded in the Fiery, and we’re gonna start, try to run the print test file on this sheet, and let’s see what, what happens.

All right, let’s see.

[00:08:01] Adrian: Okay.

[00:08:02] Karan: So it does have that shininess. I think we should try, uh, testing on, like, a regular sheet just to see, compare, like, the difference.

[00:08:09] Adrian: Okay Yeah.

[00:08:12] Karan: All right. I think you can definitely see how this looks more metallic. Yeah. It’s, it’s more like th- this industrial steel feeling. So I think what’s happening is the toner, which is basically like a wax formulation, it’s making the, the lamination on the top basically like a bit transparency, so the foil underneath coming through it, and that’s why we get this like shiny foil effect.

I think we should try doing holographic instead of the silver, and then we should also work on like a two separate passes. So one, I think we should try printing on the holographic foil.

[00:08:56] Adrian: Yeah.

[00:08:57] Karan: And then we laminate it to mute it, mute that part, and then we print on top of it to get this shiny effect, basically.

[00:09:06] Adrian: Mm. Okay. Okay. Now that we saw how it looks like when we print it on the laminated silver sheets, I’m gonna print on some laminated holographic sheets just to see if we see that rainbowy shine. So we do see that foil shine on it, and if you look at it at a certain angle, you do see that rainbow shine going through wherever the toner is.

We’ll see how Karan’s, uh, multi-pass test is gonna work.

[00:09:39] Karan: Right. So I created two passes for us to test the print for a holographic. Um, this time you’re gonna print on holographic the, the pass one, uh, which is this, and then we’re gonna laminate this, and then we’re gonna print pass two over the lamination. So as you can see how the colors are all muted now. All right, now I’m gonna print the pass two.

And hopefully the registration is okay, ’cause if the registration’s off, then we’re gonna see a tiny bit of problem there. Uh, woo. Oh. It actually worked. Oh my God, it actually worked. Look, it worked.

Okay, so anoth- there, there’s another test that I wanna try is by bumping up the density. Okay. Change setting. Expert. Here. So here you can see how there are three, uh, settings. Uh, this is value K. We don’t touch the K. This is YMC, CMY. I’m gonna make it max, and just to see how that would look. Right. So I’m gonna print pass one again.

All right, so we’re gonna laminate this. It definitely looks darker, to be honest.

[00:11:06] Adrian: Yeah.

[00:11:06] Karan: All right, so I’m gonna do the second pass. All the density high. Print and see. Oh, yeah. Let’s compare with the old one. Maybe, maybe not.

[00:11:20] Adrian: They’re so different. It’s like-

[00:11:21] Karan: There’s something, yeah …

[00:11:22] Adrian: so subtle.

[00:11:23] Karan: Yeah.

[00:11:24] Adrian: But-

[00:11:25] Karan: But this, this looks brighter.

Like, if you look at her face.

[00:11:28] Adrian: Yeah, yeah.

[00:11:29] Karan: So I think, uh, the zero density was better. I mean, this, this works, but I, I was wondering what if you use MGI and the raised varnish? I think that will have a bit, I don’t know, like- Like a more, like a better- … a poppy effect or something. Yeah.

[00:11:48] Adrian: Yeah.

[00:11:48] Karan: Yeah. But yeah, we’ll try

[00:11:53] Adrian: Okay, guys. So we did the same thing, but this time we only did the second pass with the sky because we are gonna put varnish on top of her metallic suit, and that’s gonna make the holographic foil underneath the, um, lamination pop up even more than the toner, uh, in theory. So if it works, we’re gonna have a Rider suit.

[00:12:17] Karan: Okay, that’s trippy. That’s really cool. That’s very trippy.

[00:12:22] Adrian: It’s like another level of, uh, like another dimension on it.

[00:12:28] Karan: All right. So it does look like the varnish has way better, like, the holographic effect than the toner, uh, like the only toner part

All right. So we have this final piece

What do you think?

[00:12:54] Adrian: It looks so cool.

[00:12:55] Karan: I think E- Edgar’s gonna be impressed. Now that the theory is proven, we can put any color underneath and make it look metallic, raised, and we don’t need to only rely on the, the foil colors that, you know, like the suppliers or MGI provides. Whatever your printer can print, we can make that raised and metallic holographic foil.

Hi, Edgar. Hey. So we- What up? … we have something to show you. Um, this is the challenge that you gave us. Oh,

[00:13:28] Eddie: okay. Yes. All right. Okay. Did you guys succeed, or no?

[00:13:30] Karan: It actually went really good. I’m impressed. Okay. And let’s see your reaction.

[00:13:35] Eddie: Uh,

[00:13:35] Karan: so what about you? Why

[00:13:37] Eddie: is he wearing glasses?

[00:13:39] Karan: I, I…

[00:13:41] Eddie: You’ll

[00:13:41] Karan: see

[00:13:41] Eddie: why.

You’ll see why. Okay.

[00:13:42] Karan: We first tried with the OKI, with the white toner. Awesome.

[00:13:46] Eddie: And

[00:13:46] Karan: to me, it’s just okay. I don’t think it’s that cool, or it doesn’t look that appealing. I

[00:13:52] Eddie: mean, it is still metallic, but yeah.

[00:13:53] Karan: It does. Yeah, it looks metallic.

[00:13:55] Eddie: It needs more punch. Okay.

[00:13:56] Karan: Yeah. So you

[00:13:56] Eddie: guys have something else?

[00:13:57] Karan: I think the next day, Adrian discovered- Okay

the- the soft lamination, soft-touch lamination on the silver foil. It turned it into, like, almost white, and that’s when we thought, like-

[00:14:09] Eddie: Interesting. Okay …

[00:14:10] Karan: if we already have a media that is white enough, what if we just printed in Konica? We don’t even need a white toner. Just to see if that does anything.

[00:14:20] Eddie: Yeah. So, uh, just so you guys know, the Konica that we have doesn’t have the fifth color white station, just CYMK.

[00:14:27] Karan: And this is what we got.

[00:14:29] Eddie: Oh, wow. Yeah, I can see. Oh, I see it. So this is the lamb.

[00:14:34] Karan: Yes. Yeah.

[00:14:34] Eddie: And then that’s the, the underprint. So this is the foil underneath.

[00:14:38] Karan: Yes. And

[00:14:39] Eddie: there’s no white.

[00:14:40] Karan: No.

[00:14:40] Eddie: You don’t need, you don’t need

[00:14:41] Karan: white.

We don’t need white because- No … we already have, we already discovered that you can just laminate the holographic sheet or any foil sheet and, like, kind of, like, make it muted.

[00:14:53] Eddie: I see how, how… This is metallic. I see that. This is, but this isn’t.

[00:15:01] Karan: Yes.

[00:15:02] Eddie: Okay. So how, how? So this is it? This is the challenge? No. No, no,

[00:15:07] Karan: no, no, no, no.

[00:15:07] Eddie: You did it?

[00:15:08] Karan: We did something else. Since we were curious, we were like, “Oh, wait. We have MGI.”

[00:15:14] Eddie: Oh.

[00:15:15] Karan: And that can print varnish. The liquid.

[00:15:19] Eddie: Yes. So, okay. Okay, so- Okay,

[00:15:20] Karan: okay, okay. I’m excited. Okay, I’m- So- I’m so excited, guys … we did the same artwork. Instead of, like, the soot, um, doing just a print- Mm … we actually dropped the varnish, and if you look at the effects.

[00:15:32] Eddie: Oh, holy cow. Yeah

[00:15:36] Karan: Like varnish is like- Wow … way better when it, when you want to reveal the metallic-ness of the media

[00:15:44] Eddie: Man, this, this, this is amazing I mean, this is, uh, I mean, this is just a fresh concept too, right? So this is actually, yeah.

[00:15:56] Karan: Well, we actually tested, like, bunch of- Oh,

[00:15:59] Eddie: you have more? Yeah. Okay.

[00:16:00] Karan: I mean, we, yeah, we, we- ’cause this is, like, basic, like, okay, her suit is, like, shiny, but, like, what about other colors? And so we, we did, like, three different art. Okay. None of them has any raised foils.

[00:16:14] Eddie: Wow. That holographic foil’s really popping through. I love this. I mean, it already has different colors, but man, that…

I don’t think we could achieve this with any other effect, with, uh, with foil, raised foil- Mm-hmm … even, uh, sleeking foil by itself. For this one, though, did you do that printing underneath the- I

[00:16:36] Karan: mean, yeah, we printed it underneath. Mm. And then we did the soft-touch lamination. We didn’t run the second pass.

The second pass was the MGI clear varnish.

[00:16:43] Eddie: Oh, I see. And I love this. It’s, like, pretty cool.

[00:16:46] Karan: Yes. Oh, yeah. We’re just experimenting- Yeah … with, like, more finishes.

[00:16:49] Eddie: Yeah. I mean, it looks like you’re using kind of like a reddish foil, but there’s actually no-

[00:16:53] Karan: Yeah …

[00:16:53] Eddie: raised MGI foil or anything like that. It’s still using that same process.

And this one’s pretty cool, too. Yeah.

[00:17:00] Karan: Yes. Yeah. I really like the, the face of the dragon here. It has, like, nice textures. Oh, yeah,

[00:17:06] Eddie: yeah, yeah.

[00:17:06] Karan: Yeah.

[00:17:07] Eddie: It’s good job. Yeah. I’m amazed how this turned out, guys. Congrats to Adrian in having this amazing idea. You know, I, I do feel that, like, ColorLogic, I do love this system.

You know, it, it, it is something I think that some, um, people can use, but I don’t think it’s for everybody. I mean, small shops and, um, may not be able to afford, uh, such an expensive solution, or even have the right equipment. I mean, you’d still need that white press and even the white toner.

[00:17:32] Karan: Yes. It’s

[00:17:32] Eddie: really expensive.

But this is something that small runs, more flexible, the equipment that it can run. And I, I actually think you can be a little bit more creative and exciting with this- Yes … type of process, too. So I’m excited, and I’m excited to see where this goes. I think that wraps us up. So to everybody watching, thank you for joining us for another challenge.

On behalf of Adrian, Karan, and myself, Edgar Davin, see you in the next video. Bye for now.

[00:18:06] Karan: Adrian, we’re done. Adrian.

What? Is it too shiny? Like, whoo. Shoot,

[00:18:16] Eddie: man.

[00:18:16] Adrian: I’ve been staring at this for,

[00:18:18] Karan: like,

three days.