Hi Guys
I recently started working with a screen printer, re-drawing the scraps of paper his customers give him into nice clean vector art. But I am struggling with my half tones.
What is the best was to create a half tone for screen printing?
This is the image, it will be a one colour (white) print on a black t-shirt. I just need to get my half tones correct or it will look like crap!
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
PommyJosh said: Hi Guys I recently started working with a screen printer, re-drawing the scraps of paper his customers give him into nice clean vector art. But I am struggling with my half tones. What is the best was to create a half tone for screen printing? This is the image, it will be a one colour (white) print on a black t-shirt. I just need to get my half tones correct or it will look like crap! Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Be aware that the image you see on a monitor or paper will not be what it looks like when screen printed. Solid colors are fine but shades of color will gain in density when screen printed. An object that you fill with 80% of a color will look more like a solid fill when printed. This is dot gain and the amount of 'gain' will depend on several factors such as squeegee hardness, sharpness, and pressure and mesh count and tightness. On the other end of the tone range, depending on the quality of the positive, the emulsion, and the exposure setup, you may not be able to capture something as small of a 10% dot when using normal line frequencies. I design using tones between 20% and 80%. Being a manual printer, I can, if need be, increase the density of the tones to achieve the look I want during on press printing. - Scotty
Hmmm, very informative post Scotty.
scottyjr said: Hi Guys I recently started working with a screen printer, re-drawing the scraps of paper his customers give him into nice clean vector art. But I am struggling with my half tones. What is the best was to create a half tone for screen printing? This is the image, it will be a one colour (white) print on a black t-shirt. I just need to get my half tones correct or it will look like crap! Any help would be greatly appreciated!
[/quote]
Scotty, this isn't entirely true. You can indeed produce halftones in screenprinting, either by using the Postscript printer driver as suggested in this thread, or by manually converting the image to a halftone first (also demonstrated in this thread). You can basically turn any vector image into halftones, by using the Bitmap > Mode > B/W dialog, choose the shape, angle, and lpi, and you have a halftone image. You can then CorelTrace the image to turn it back into vector art, if desired. It will print out exactly as it appears on your monitor, even with a non-postscript printer. This method is not as desirable in most cases for actual screenprinting as using the RIP postscript options, but I did this for many years before I had a PS printer, and still use the technique today to create that graphic 'comic book' screen feeling.