About NestSheet
Built inside a real print shop.
NestSheet is DTF prepress software made by people who run gang sheets for a living — not a layout tool imagined in a pitch deck.
The story
It started at the bench, not the whiteboard.
NestSheet was built inside a working print shop. The prepress problems it solves are the ones operators hit every day: mixed customer files that need an hour of Photoshop before they can be ganged, white underbase that halos on dark garments, and RIPs that reject a file because a spot channel is named wrong.
So we built the tool we wanted to stand next to the printer: a packer that lays the sheet out tighter than a tired operator at 6 pm, a white channel you can inspect before it costs film, and an export that names channels the way the RIP downstream expects.
Every feature ships the same way — it runs on our own production jobs first. If it doesn’t survive a real print day, it doesn’t go in the product, and it doesn’t go on this site.
— The founding team
Why not Photoshop
Photoshop is an editor. A gang sheet is production.
Photoshop is a superb raster editor — and the wrong tool for building gang sheets. It doesn’t nest: every placement is a human dragging rectangles and eyeballing gaps. It doesn’t derive a white underbase from alpha with a controlled choke — that’s a chain of manual selections that goes subtly wrong on the tenth job of the day. And it doesn’t know what your RIP expects a spot channel to be called.
NestSheet does exactly that production slice — packing, white, channel naming, export — and nothing else. It doesn’t retouch photos and it isn’t a design tool. Different jobs, different software.
The product today
DTF-first, and honest about it.
What you get right now — the same list the code enforces, with nothing borrowed from the roadmap.
- Automatic gang-sheet nesting with rotation 0/90°, gap and margin control, on rolls from 300 to 1800 mm (custom up to 2000 × 10000 mm).
- Alpha-derived white underbase with choke 0–10 px, threshold, soft-hand and halftone modes — previewed before export.
- A Prep terminal with six in-place fixes for customer files: remove background, fix invisible pixels, colour knockout, fringe doctor, halftone dithering, White Underbase Lab.
- Nineteen export recipes across TIFF, PNG, PSD/PSB and PDF, with real spot channels and W1–W8 / V1–V4 naming; six RIP presets in the box.
- Cloud accounts with monthly allowances measured only in exported m², a free-forever tier, and export history kept for 72 hours.
- On the roadmap — not in the product yet: a UV-DTF mode, automatic multi-sheet split, a public API. We say so on every page that touches them.
Our rule on numbers
No number without a source.
The print industry’s marketing is full of utilisation percentages nobody can reproduce. Our rule is simpler: a number appears on this site only when it comes from the code, from a published benchmark with methodology and data, or from a real readout you can see in the screenshot next to it. No testimonials we didn’t earn, no “average across shops” we can’t measure, no trial-clock tricks — the free tier is simply free.