I am a full time musician and a part time graphic designer. In the past our band T-shirts have always been screen printed. But now I have designed a shirt with several different half tones included. It looks pretty cool, but when screen printed it leaves dots instead of solid colors. I see these designs on a lot of shirts these days with out the dots. What printing technique should I use to have the shirt printed and can anyone direct me to some one to purchase them from? Thanks
Halftones are dots. Each shade would be a different PMS color. That is an easy screen print for us doing it that way. If the shirts you are seeing is massed produced even a little it is probably screen printed.
There are four solid colours there - white & three greys.
Therefore you can do it by halftones, which look dotty, though you can print smaller dots to give the same effect or,
You can print four screens, which is more expensive. DTG is a possibility for low volume.
You don't say where you're based.
I should have said in my first post. I put the gray BG on so the white could be seen. So the BG is not part of the design. I want to get rid of the dots. That is my main thing now. Can it be printed in a way there are are no dots or do I need to design it a different way? I don't want to lose the transparency that appear in some places.
I still have four greys?
If you want to get rid of the dots, you need to print solid colours and each shade of grey is a separate colour.
Maybe you can handle smaller dots, otherwise you need four screens.
I recently printed a job that was supposed to be black ink on an ice grey shirt. It was text with drop shadows and tints of black in some of the text. I know from experience that if I print the solid black and tints from one screen, if the solids need another hit to get a good solid black, the tints will start plugging up. What I did on this job was a screen for the solid black, a screen for the drop shadows, a screen for the black tint type, for which I used a solid grey ink, and I added a white keyline around the main text in the middle to make it pop. It turned out great. When push comes to shove, do whatever it takes to make the job look good. This simple black ink job I did ended up taking 4 screens, but it was worth it. Had I done it with one screen only, it wouldn't have looked nearly as good.
Prints like this warrant the four screens as the veterans recommend. It is an excellent design, so make it come out great!
To get it printed nice, you may even consider mixing one or two of the inks for this project a little thinner. I did this trick for one or two things and the client was amazed at their results!
Stick with the advice of these experienced guys, should you have more like that to do in in future.
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Printing Technique - Half Tones 
