For designers: hand over artwork that prints

What to check before you hand it over

• Ink count. How many are really needed for the image to still be itself, and how much area each covers.
• Thin lines and gaps. Anything below what the mesh holds will vanish or fill in on the print.
• Isolated dots. Small detail with no neighbours does not survive making the screen.
• Resolution. Whether there are enough pixels for the line count it will be printed at.

All of it is free: only exporting the finished files is paid, and a designer rarely needs that. Knowing the artwork will pass is usually the point.

Talking to the printer in numbers

Instead of "something does not print", specifics: how many inks, what line count, where exactly it is too thin and by how much. The preview shows what the print will look like in that number of inks, and can be shown to a client before anything is committed.

What to bring

PNG or JPEG at print resolution. 300 ppi at the size of the print is the usual mark. Export vector to raster first. Transparency in a PNG is respected: fully transparent areas read as places with no ink rather than as white.

How many inks is not a matter of taste

Every ink is a separate screen, a separate pass and a separate registration. So the ink count sets both the price of the job and its risk: on eight inks any misregistration shows far more than on three.

Once you can see how much area each ink covers, it becomes obvious which are working and which were added just in case. An ink covering one and a half per cent usually changes nothing in the print, and costs the same as any other.

Dark garments are their own problem

On dark fabric, color inks go dull without a white base under them: the cloth shows through the film of ink. So a base goes down first, and it is an ink of its own, it counts in the price and in the design.

The finest light detail on dark is the first thing to disappear: it lives on the smallest halftone dots, and those image worst. If the artwork has a delicate light gradient on black, check it before you show it to a client.

Why a gradient does not survive the press

A screen holds a dot only between two sizes. Too small and it washes out with the emulsion; too large and neighbouring dots bridge and the tone goes solid. At 80 lines per inch the window works out at roughly 13 to 85 percent.

So a fade that runs to nothing in the file does not run to nothing on the garment. It reaches the smallest dot the screen can hold and then drops to bare fabric. The dark end does the same in reverse, where the last stretch fills in to solid ink.

The fix belongs in the artwork rather than in the separation. End a fade on a visible edge instead of in open space, or run it into a shape that is meant to be solid.

Which problems are yours and which are the shop’s

The checks divide cleanly. Some are about the drawing, and only you can change them. Some are about the press, and there is nothing you can do from your side.

• Yours. A stroke thinner than the press can hold, a gap between two inks that closes up, a scatter of stray pixels left by a filter.
• Theirs. The line count, the angles, the mesh, how many inks the run will take.

Knowing the line before you call saves the round where a file comes back asking for thicker, with no number attached.

FAQ