Best decal printing services in 2025?

[Swamp Dog]

7 hours ago, sidcharles said:

for everyone who touts a favorite supplier of anything: if they are so good and you value their product,

 

POST A LINK   for crying out loud

i gotta do everything around here?  cheesh . . . .       STS Scale Model Decals – STSDecals

come down before you pass out... if you had read all the post its not about a link to STS. they all ready made their orders but have not got them. but you can be the link man.  😁

Edited July 19 by Swamp Dog

[sidcharles]

41 minutes ago, Swamp Dog said:

... you can be the link man.  😁

SOLID!

[Can-Con]

I just googled "STS decals" and it was the first return to come up, right on top of the page. 

Maybe if anyone wanted to get in touch with them, or any other company, maybe they could try that. It might work for them too, who knows. 😐

[Swamp Dog]

1 hour ago, Can-Con said:

I just googled "STS decals" and it was the first return to come up, right on top of the page. 

Maybe if anyone wanted to get in touch with them, or any other company, maybe they could try that. It might work for them too, who knows. 😐

Google is my go to for any thing i need to know and some things i dont want to know lol. but i got Terry (STS) on speed dial when i need to talk to him, and everyone that has not receive their decals within 10 week's should call him. he will tell you when you order it will take 6 to 8 weeks to get them. i have got them sooner and one time it was later than 8 weeks. i made the call a few weeks later. sometime orders do get misplaced. we are not perfect.  

[SpeedAndViolence]

For those that are interested, I called them today and was told that the artwork for my decals is complete, and that all that is left is to size them for printing (my words not theirs) and I should expect to hear back from them within the next couple of days. ( I'm assuming proofs of the art prior to being sent to print?) 

[LOBBS]

55 minutes ago, SpeedAndViolence said:

For those that are interested, I called them today and was told that the artwork for my decals is complete, and that all that is left is to size them for printing (my words not theirs) and I should expect to hear back from them within the next couple of days. ( I'm assuming proofs of the art prior to being sent to print?) 

Yes, you should get proofs before print from what I was told. I sent them my artwork, ready to print and needing no adjustments, got an invoice the next day and a response the day after that was paid that I'd be receiving proofs before he printed them. Price was more reasonable than I was expecting to boot but that could possibly be because I did a lot of the legwork in terms of file preparation and sizing.

[SpeedAndViolence]

16 minutes ago, LOBBS said:

Yes, you should get proofs before print from what I was told. I sent them my artwork, ready to print and needing no adjustments, got an invoice the next day and a response the day after that was paid that I'd be receiving proofs before he printed them. Price was more reasonable than I was expecting to boot but that could possibly be because I did a lot of the legwork in terms of file preparation and sizing.

I was not able to send them any artwork. So I just sent them a link to a photo gallery of the car I'm basing my project on. 99% of the decals on the car are sponsor decals, so I assumed (maybe incorrectly?) that would be easy. Find the company logo, trace it, make it solid black, boom, done.

In fact, the only deviation from what I wanted other than what was already on the real car, was changing the '429' to a '520', to rep a 3D printed 'John Kaase' block. 

[peteski]

Finding vector-based logos is easy for most part,  and so is changing the color, but the harder part is to get them the correct size for your model.  When I design decal art for a model I actually place the model's shell on a scanner and scan it. That gives me the correct size reference I need to virtually place the decal images over the scanned shell in my drawing program to determine their sizes.

[LOBBS]

1 hour ago, peteski said:

Finding vector-based logos is easy for most part,  and so is changing the color, but the harder part is to get them the correct size for your model.  When I design decal art for a model I actually place the model's shell on a scanner and scan it. That gives me the correct size reference I need to virtually place the decal images over the scanned shell in my drawing program to determine their sizes.

Not at all slightest jealous that you have a scanner 😅. I've got at least a few projects sitting idle because I need things scanned. I've just not been able to cough up the $$$ yet. I have a hobby license of Solidworks at home so I can do CAD work tho to either create or modify stuff for 3D printing.

[peteski]

1 hour ago, LOBBS said:

Not at all slightest jealous that you have a scanner 😅. I've got at least a few projects sitting idle because I need things scanned. I've just not been able to cough up the $$$ yet. I have a hobby license of Solidworks at home so I can do CAD work tho to either create or modify stuff for 3D printing.

LOL,  I should clarify.  I'm old school. I don't own a 3D scanner.  Just a 20 year old 1200dpi flatbed Epson.  Since most of the decals are for the car side, I place the model's shell with the side down and scan it.  If I need to, I also scan the top side (roof, hood and trunk areas).  Corel Draw is a 2D drawing program.  I import the scan to a locked layer so I can draw the decal images over the scan.

Here is an example.

In this drawing the bottom 2 images are scans of the model's body, and as you can see I'm placing and sizing the decal artwork over them to make it correct size.  In the drawing everything is in 1:1 scale (model's scale that is), so if the decals look good over the scanned body, they will look good on the model.  The rest of the images were some photos of the actual car from the internet I was using to create the decal images from.