She'd print a forelock, a nose, a neck, a tail. As she cut pieces from the fabric, she stuck them to her workroom wall, assembling the horses like a large jigsaw puzzle. Canon had given her a case of the fabric sheets, and she went through most of it trying to print images that looked just right. I printed about a hundred sheets just experimenting with different Photoshop filters and color adjustments, trying to get the colors I wanted. I had to learn how to adjust colors from screen to fabric, since what appears on the screen doesn't appear the same on the fabric.
Colors look so much lighter when they're printed on fabric because fabric is more porous than paper.
I struggled and struggled with that. At one point I tried printing over a fabric sheet twice to get the color intensity I wanted, but the image still didn't appear dark enough. Dark colors proved the most problematic. Johnston found that blacks had to be specified as 100 percent black in Photo-Shop in order to appear their darkest when printed on fabric. She became a pro at learning to adjust colors in Photo-Shop to get them looking right on the fabric.