![]() ![]() Thankfully, halftone screen printing is an extremely common technique, and most professional grade software will have the option to let the computer do it for you. Those images would be nearly impossible to halftone manually without a lot of time and even more talent. The real power of halftone printing is that it allows you to print more photorealistic images with printers that would otherwise be incapable of doing so. ![]() How to halftone an image for screen printingĪs you can imagine, creating a halftone image from even a simple image by hand would be a lot of work. This doesn't mean you need to avoid those tones, just that you need to be mindful that they may appear darker than you intended and design around that possibility. The problem is most pronounced in the midtones. This is when the dots absorb into the material when printing and appear larger (and therefore darker) than they should. So, err on the side of caution when designing the image.Ī common problem with halftone printing is dot gain. Remember, it's easier to downscale an image than to upscale one, and a DPI that's too high will not degrade quality but a DPI that's too low will. To know what DPI to use, you should know what LPI (lines per inch) your printer is set to and set your DPI to twice that value. Instead, you show go by DPI (dots per inch). Firstly, you don't want to measure your resolution in pixels. First off is the resolution of your image. To get the best results when screen printing a halftone image, there are a few specifications and best practices to keep in mind. Halftone screen printing can be used on any color to create various shades of that color without needing a printer capable of laying down different shades of ink. For a more convincing effect that gives the illusion of continuous color, the dots can be made smaller so they are harder to see from a distance with the naked eye. When these dots are large, the effect can be very artistic. The various shades of grey would go from very large dots that are close together on the black end to tiny dots that are far apart on the white end. Solid black would be black dots that overlap each other. With halftone screening, the same intensity of ink is used throughout the printing process, but it is placed on the surface using differing sized dots. ![]() When this method isn't possible, or is limited, halftone screening is used instead. By doing so, the printer is able to produce a number of different shades of grey, or any other color. Ordinarily, to print a gradient that goes from black to white with shades of grey in between, you'd use a printer that can apply different amounts of black ink. With halftone images, you be able to print photorealistic images even with the limitations of screen printing. Thankfully, printers have solved this problem many years ago using a technique called halftoning. With only cyan, magenta, yellow, and black to work with in a typical CMYK printer, the inability to create different shades reduces the possible outputs. Because screen printing prints a single color at a time, and doesn't have any control over how much ink is laid down, mixing colors is nearly impossible. But if you don't know what you are doing, the limitations can seem difficult to overcome. Screen printing is a common method used by professional printers all over the world.
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