Get advice to help you create your t-shirt graphics. Discuss t-shirt design software, special effect techniques, or other topics related to creating a t-shirt design on your computer. If you'd rather hire a graphic designer to do the work for you, please post in our Referrals and Recommendations section here.
Hi guys I had a question about opening a new document in Illustrator. When you open a new doc in the advanced options it has the Raster Effects option. I've set to 72ppi because I read it was suitable for docs used on the web but what about when you are going to use your work for a catalog, should you set it higher? What setting do you guys use on this? I've been using this setting for my designs but I imagine it doesn't matter for that purpose because from what I understand this option is only significant when you transfer the Ai file to a 'raster' program such as photoshop. Am I right or is there more to it? Thanks in advance!
Use 300 at a minimum - check with where you are sending the files if they want something better/higher - I never do anything less than 300 dpi - make a gradient and printing at 72 and then change the raster setting to 300 the blend will be alot smoother at 300
So are you doing work for print such as catalogs and such? Most of the work I've done thus far was for my webcomic and the designs for my shirts but I guess it won't hurt to up the PPI for the shirt designs and my future catalog.
I work for a commercial printer and do vinyl stickers etc on the side - we output at 2400 dpi and 150 lpi and 72 dpi looks bad - and I dont mean in a good way
Yes, unless you are converting the AI file to a bmp/tiff/jpeg format, you won't be rasterising, imported/linked images will be at their normal resolution.
So Don't Panic.
Dave
As Dave stated, the raster effects setting should have no effect unless you're planning to rasterize your graphics which if you're going to high resolution output would make no sense. Also if you import/place a raster graphics image it will not down-res it to 72ppi...it will keep whatever the original res of the graphic is. BTW, I never touch that setting and I output regularly at 2400 dpi for brochure and poster work. So unless you're exporting to a bitmap format you won't encounter any issues.
Illustrator Raster Effect question 
