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izzyclothing · May 8th, 2008

Hey, i see that there are questions similar, however i don't know if the style i wanted was similar. What is the technique used for the shirts in the included links? I have read that you should use transfer sheets but i dont think they would turn out this good on colored shirts? So are these exposed screens and ink? Please help......any experts!

Cake Clothing

brent · May 11th, 2008

welcome to the forums.

Grayscale or black and white photo printing like that, with screen printing, is done with "halftone" printing, which is turning the artwork into a million tiny dots, like a newspaper does, then printing those tiny dots.

Matto · May 12th, 2008

I printed something similar last week. Turned the photo to grey scale, sent it to the printer via RIP and burned the positive to the screen. turned out perfect.

Muffintop · May 12th, 2008

Is there a specific way to do "halftones" or if does that just mean I make the picture grayscale.

Ken Styles · May 12th, 2008

You will need a RIP. There are also free ones that you can use just search the forum for halftone

Matto · May 12th, 2008

I personally would just go buy the RIP software. I tried the ghost RIP and for me it was too difficult to use as I am not computer savvy. The RIP program I am using is simple and straight forward. I am sure if I had spent a little more time with ghost rip I might have figured it out but that would have meant spending time on that and not on graphics. It is a choice you have to make on your own. The half tones you want are created in the RIP software to make your printer print in halftone dots of varying size instead of smooth gradients. There are guys on this forum that could school you on half tones, unfortunately I am not one of them as I am still green behind the ears in this area. Be patient one of them will find you and help you out. Good luck.

lindyts · May 12th, 2008

Just convert the picture to Grayscale, invert it, this will make it look like a negative. Output to a postscript printer at about 50dpi. Any postscript printer will support halftoning.

macmiller · May 13th, 2008

also, to print it one color on darks, invert the image. it will look weird on film, but will print to look like normal.

tman07 · May 15th, 2008

Higher mesh count on your screen is important too, a 180 is ok, a 230 is better and a 305 a probably the best.

Printing your positve using a 40 lpi will give a finer dot. Others may use a 35 lpi and others a 45, will take some experimentation.

tpitman · May 18th, 2008

If you've got Photoshop you can output photos as bitmap halftones at whatever linescreen, angle and dot shape you want without a RIP or a postscript printer. It's a faster to use Ghostscript, or a RIP, but it's not bad, and needless to say, the price is right. If you're doing multi-color work, you have to split your channels and output each separately, but unless you're outputting a lot of film, it works very well.