Pre-press, simplified

The gang-sheet builder your pre-press actually wants

Tighter packing than you can do by hand. Output your RIP already understands. Every printer model and material family in the print-on-film industry, handled quietly.

92–96%
Typical sheet utilisation
2 min
Design-to-RIP time
0.4 s
Time to pack 500 items
12+
Supported RIPs out of box
order-4418.nest · 94.2% utilisation
94.2%
60 cm DTF roll · 17 items Ready for MainTOP
RIP & toolchain support
MainTOP Cadlink AcroRIP VersaWorks RasterLink Onyx ZePrA Fiery SAi Flexi + more on request
Before / after

What changes when the packer stops being manual

Same operator, same RIP, same shirts. Only the gang-sheet tool changes.

BEFORE

Without NestSheet

  • Operator nests 30 orders in Photoshop by hand
  • White under-base hand-drawn per item, halo on dark shirts
  • Forgets to mirror one sublimation job, reprints the sheet
  • Export 6 TIFFs with wrong ICC profile, RIP silently re-profiles
  • Typical sheet density: 62–71%
  • Time per sheet: 35–50 minutes
AFTER

With NestSheet

  • Drop 30 orders in, packer yields 92–96% in under a second
  • Alpha-derived white with per-job choke, no halo
  • Mirror-per-workflow default, zero hand-checked toggles
  • CMYK+W TIFF with embedded ICC matching your RIP
  • Typical sheet density: 92–96%
  • Time per sheet: 90 seconds — including review
What NestSheet does

Six things a gang-sheet tool should be doing

Everything that happens between a customer's files and a clean sheet on the press. NestSheet handles these so your operators can stop handling them manually.

Automatic gang-sheet nesting

Mixed artwork packed at 92–96% utilisation on any roll width from 30 cm to 120 cm. The packer respects rotation locks, minimum gutters, and artwork groupings you want kept together.

Correct white under-base generation

Alpha-derived white with per-job choke control, hard-threshold by default to avoid feathered edges. Preview shows the greyscale white channel the RIP will see before you export.

RIP-ready output

CMYK+W TIFF with embedded ICC profile exactly how MainTOP, Cadlink Digital Factory, AcroRIP, Roland VersaWorks, Mimaki RasterLink, Onyx, ColorLogic ZePrA, Fiery / CADlink, SAi Flexi expect it — with Wasatch SoftRIP and Mutoh VerteLith expanding. No re-export step.

Multi-sheet split planner

Orders that exceed a single sheet split across multiple sheets on gutter lines — never through artwork. Per-sheet filenames encode the Y-range and part index; a manifest.json ships in the zip for reorder traceability.

ICC-accurate on-screen preview

Drop in the profile your RIP uses; the preview renders through it. What you see is what the press will produce — not a generic sRGB approximation.

Static, crawlable marketing

This page and every marketing route ships as pre-rendered HTML. Bing, Yandex, Perplexity, Claude and ChatGPT all see the full content without executing JavaScript. Every route is a real document, not a shell.

How it works

Order list to printable file, four steps

STEP 01

Import your order

Drop in a folder of TIFF, PNG, PDF or PSD files, or paste a CSV from your order intake. NestSheet extracts dimensions, alpha channels, and any ICC metadata the files carry.

STEP 02

Nest automatically

The packer lays out every item on the sheet size you picked, respecting gutters, rotation rules, and multi-sheet limits. Typical run for 500 items: under half a second.

STEP 03

Preview and tune

Inspect the white channel, choke, and ICC-profiled colour preview. Override anything at the per-job level without digging through settings dialogs.

STEP 04

Export and print

Pick the target RIP, click export. NestSheet writes the TIFF (or PDF, or PNG) in exactly the format your downstream pipeline is expecting. Send to press.

Under the hood

White channel preview before you burn film

The grey map is the instruction your RIP will send to the printer. White ink density, per pixel. If there’s a halo on dark shirts, it shows here first.

  • Per-job choke — 0.2 to 1.0 mm slider, live preview updates
  • Hard threshold by default — no feathered edges, no halos
  • Variable-dot opt-in — for shops that know they want it
Read the choke deep-dive
WHITE CHANNEL · CHOKE 0.35 mm LIVE PREVIEW
Colour layer
White channel (RIP view)
Alpha expanded by 0.35 mm · hard threshold · maintop.icc embedded
Integrations

Already in the stack you’re running

Order intake, RIP export, automation, file formats. No adapter layer, no custom scripts — the named things below are actually tested.

E-commerce
Shopify Etsy WooCommerce BigCommerce Square
Print workflow
MainTOP Cadlink DF AcroRIP VersaWorks RasterLink Onyx ZePrA Fiery SAi Flexi
Automation
Zapier Make n8n REST API Webhooks
File formats
TIFF PNG PSD PDF SVG EPS
Pricing

Two plans. Free forever or Pro at $49/mo.

Free covers exploration and low-volume work — no credit card, no trial countdown. Pro lifts the 3-per-day export cap to unlimited and includes every future tier until we stabilise pricing. Cancel Pro any month.

Free
$0 /forever
Explore the editor. No credit card.
  • 3 exports per day
  • PNG + sRGB TIFF @ 300 dpi
  • MaxRects nesting at 92–96%
  • Community support
Start free
MOST POPULAR
Pro
$49 /mo
Daily DTF / UV / sublimation production
  • Unlimited exports
  • Saved sheets + priority queue
  • DTF 8-channel TIFF (CMYK+W+K)
  • All future tiers included until pricing stabilises
Start Pro

We were spending half an hour per gang sheet in Photoshop. NestSheet does the same thing in 90 seconds and gives us a tighter pack than we did by hand. I stopped hiring for pre-press.

— Studio operator, DTF shop running 90–140 orders a day
For whom

Built for the print-on-film industry

DTF

DTF print shops

Gang-sheet mixed orders without the manual Photoshop detour per sheet. CMYK+W TIFF with embedded ICC, writing straight into MainTOP, Cadlink Digital Factory or AcroRIP.

UV

UV and UV-DTF shops

Varnish, white, and CMYK channels written with the spot-channel names your RIP expects. Per-substrate ICC switching for cups, acrylic, transfer film.

SUB

Sublimation shops

Mirror on by default, bleed-aware nesting, ink coverage estimate per sheet. Compatible with the sublimation RIPs the apparel industry actually uses.

ECO

Eco-solvent shops

Large-format friendly without memory bloat, cut-contour registration marks correct for GCC, Summa, Roland and Graphtec cutters, tiling for oversized prints.

OPS

Studio leads

Stable per-sheet filenames, manifest.json for reorder traceability, project history so reprints reproduce the exact file the customer received last time.

DEV

Developers

REST API access for scripted order intake and export pipelines. Webhook notifications on sheet-ready, reorder, and export events.

FAQ

Answers before you ask

Which RIPs does NestSheet support out of the box?

Nine presets ship in the box: MainTOP, AcroRIP, SAi Flexi, PrintEXP, Caldera / Onyx, ColorLogic ZePrA, Fiery / CADlink, Mimaki RasterLink, and Roland VersaWorks. Wasatch SoftRIP and Mutoh VerteLith are expanding in compatibility. Additional RIPs are supported on request — we run a real shop-side integration test before claiming support.

Does NestSheet write the white channel for me?

Yes. White is generated from the colour alpha with a configurable choke amount (typically 0.2–0.4 mm for DTF). Hard-threshold by default to avoid feathered edges; variable-dot white is opt-in per job. You can override the generated white by supplying your own channel.

What happens when an order exceeds one sheet?

The multi-sheet split planner divides the order across N sheets using one of three strategies: fill-then-spill, balanced, or group-by-kind. Split lines are snapped to gutter rows so the cutter never runs through artwork, per-sheet filenames encode the Y-range and part index, and a manifest.json records the order-to-sheet mapping.

Can I use my own ICC profile?

Yes. Drop in the profile your RIP and press are calibrated against; the on-screen preview renders through it and the exported TIFF embeds it. If you are not running a custom profile, the RIP's default profile is already selected on export.

Do I need to install anything?

No — NestSheet runs in the browser. Modern Chrome, Safari, Edge or Firefox on macOS, Windows or Linux. Files are processed locally where the browser permits and on our servers for heavier operations; artwork is deleted on schedule and we do not use it to train models.

Does the marketing site work without JavaScript?

Yes. Every marketing route (landing, about, blog, use cases) is pre-rendered static HTML. Search engines and AI crawlers see the full content. JavaScript is only loaded for the product itself, at /app.

Is there a free trial?

Fourteen days, no credit card. Plug in an actual order list, generate real sheets, send them to your actual RIP. A trial that is a real trial.

How is NestSheet different from Photoshop?

Photoshop is a raster editor. NestSheet is a production tool. Photoshop does not nest, does not write correct white under-base for DTF, does not know what a RIP expects, and does not split multi-sheet orders on gutters. NestSheet does not retouch photos. Different jobs.

See it on your own orders

14-day free trial. No credit card. Plug in a real order list and measure the sheet density yourself.