I know EPS (vector) files are great for screen printing, but what about PNG files with a transparent background. Are these ok? Have any of you guys experienced any problems with PNG files? Thanks ahead of time.
-Pat Patrick Bryant Art Gallery
Thx man. Yes I would def. make a 300 dpi image. And 1 more question: is an RGB color pallete ok or does it have to be cmyk or pantone? thx again
-Pat Patrick Bryant Art Gallery
PNG is a lossless compressed bitmap format designed for Internet images
.png is a lossless compressed bitmap format designed for Internet images, not commercial graphics. It can have transparency like .gif files.
The format is no guarantee that the image will reproduce well with screen printing. Focus on the pixel size of the image and do the math. A 300 pixel image at a final size of 300 ppi (pixels per inch), produces a 1 inch image. A 10 inch image needs a 3000 pixel image.
How are you going to print the image? Spot colors (Pantone), 3 RGB computer colors or transparent, full color process (CMYK)?
This is why scalable, hard edged, vector images are the easiest to separate for screen printing. How many heads do you have to print with? You will work very hard to separate Internet images with hundreds of colors into 6, screen printing colors.
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How are you measuring? former Ulano Technical Support Screen printing since 1979 - SGIA Academy Member
Yes it has to be 300dpi at actual print size or at least 200dpi at pretty good image dimensions to be usable, but the reason I said I like them, it that some designs have a white printer in them, and if you send a jpg on a white background or tiff on a white background, then the white may get lost. I'd prefer a photoshop file or vector pdf myself.
I'm really starting to like pdf, it's viewable, portable, compressible, and vector capable, and you can swing in between programs all you want.
Wouldn't a PNG only be a little better than a JPEG of equal resolution if you have more than 1 color?
I mean you still need to separate everything manually, or use a color sep program right?
I prefer photoshop to Illustrator for a lot of things, and what I've been doing is setting up each color as 1 -2 layers, and 1 layer for registration marks, etc. Wouldn't that be better than using PNG format?
Ok png can ve vector and bitmap. So depending on what you use, fireworks can handle it either way. But if you open it in other graphics app, it might be rendered.
The issue is color space and reproduction.
Our workflow is simple.
We work in raw or psd for bitmaps and AI or cdr for vector.
For output we use tiff for printing and for rendered output. For web, and some video we use jpeg, gif and lastly png.
The thing is why not use what's standard I don't know of anyone that would accept png for printing.
You can use it but simply why?
Png has issues with rendering engines, macs and pc will not produce or match colors.
thx for the info guys. i was just curious about the png file thing and just wanted to make sure of the prefered file type for screenprinters. vector art just takes a little longer to create so i wanted to see if i could do my normal photoshop work and save it out as png with a transparent background. but i have plenty of vector art too so...
-Pat Patrick Bryant Art Gallery
PNG files 
