urbyboy980

Hi Everyone.

Ok so my partner and I have completed our designs in photoshop and we are ready to move a long to get them printed. What I would like to know is what output settings should we use when saving the final photoshop product (color dpi, what type of extension (png?) etc) in order to achieve the best quality t-shirts. Also, I keep hearing on here about vectors. What do these mean and should we be saving these images as vectors (how would i do this?). Also, I have the link to all of the istockphoto t-shirt templates, how would i take my design and apply it on to the shirt in order to display on my site. I know its a lot of questions, its just we have 5 or 6 finished designs and would like to know optimal output settings to get maximum quality out of our t-shirts. Thanks!

 

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jong

300 dpi is usually a good start for sending it to the printer. But I've heard different printers say different things about the format.
Some want PDF, others like TIFF, some are OK with JPEG. I would save it as a regular PSD and then ask the printer what he needs to get things going. You can always export the original PSD to whatever, It's a lot more difficult, to get things back to square one.

As for Vectors. Vector Graphics are based on lines, points, curves and such that relate to each other to make up a graphic. Vector can be scaled up and down without degrading the image. This is opposed to raster images like bitmaps, gifs, jpegs and the like which are a grid of colored pixels. the more you scale them the more corruption in the image.



Adobe Illustrator, Flash, Freehand, CorelDraw are Vector programs. Photoshop, Painter, MSPaint are for Raster images.

 

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orangehead

In order to put your designs on the shirt. You can easily use photoshop with two layers. First put your shirt template on one layer. Your second layer should be the design. Scale the design so that it fits on the shirt and then you can mess around with the appearance by setting the layer properties to multiply. It may look more realistic that way.

 

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urbyboy980

Thanks for the replies so far I am now understanding the advantages to vectors, so how would i take my photoshop designs and vectorize them?

 

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orangehead

From what I know, it is not possible to simply convert a photoshop file into a vector file. (i may be wrong) Instead, you need to redraw the file using the vector tools like pen and pencil in illustrator. You can have the original photoshop image and trace over it with the vectors. There is also a tool known as Live Trace in illustrator which traces recognizable shapes in your original image, converting them into vector graphics.

 

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