[RSpill]

Hi,

A client of mine wants to take a black and white photo of their daughter and print it on a white shirt using only black ink. The printer suggested that I create a bitmap of the image, then use Live Trace in Illustrator to vectorize the image.

However, when I run live trace, it looks bad and a lot of the black dots run together and looks like a big blob.

Any suggestions?

 

[Kime]

In Photoshop you can take the photo and change to index mode and have only black and white in your color pallet. 150-160 DPI would work for 200 mesh. You can do the same thing in Corel, but it is called palletize, or something like that. It doesn't render well in index mode so you can change it back to RGB mode after you index to get a better idea of how the print will look. When you look at it close up you will see that it is a bunch of black and white squares.

You might want to experiment with increasing the contrast of the photo. It looks best with high contrast images.

Here is one I did with white ink on a black shirt. Your DPI can be higher if you are using higher mesh.

I can't figure out how to get the image to show up. Sorry about that.

 

[red514]

In Photoshop you can take the photo and change to index mode and have only black and white in your color pallet. 150-160 DPI would work for 200 mesh. You can do the same thing in Corel, but it is called palletize, or something like that. It doesn't render well in index mode so you can change it back to RGB mode after you index to get a better idea of how the print will look. When you look at it close up you will see that it is a bunch of black and white squares.

You might want to experiment with increasing the contrast of the photo. It looks best with high contrast images.

Here is one I did with white ink on a black shirt. Your DPI can be higher if you are using higher mesh.

the index method isn't a bad option but i would recommend using halftones instead (less banding with this method). you will capture more smooth details using this method.
image should be 300 dpi at actual size. convert mode to grayscale, the convert to bitmap. the bitmap settings depend on the mesh you plan to use. for a 200 mesh i recommend 45lpi for the frequency with an angle of 22 degrees.

If you don't want to use halftones or any small dots, try doing the index method Kime mentions but use 50% threshold instead of dithering. with this technique it's best to use an image resolution of 300dpi for cleaner edges and lines.

 

[Kime]

I wonder why the printer suggested that the image be vectorized? Maybe he can't print halftones.

 

[Celtic]

I wonder why the printer suggested that the image be vectorized? Maybe he can't print halftones.

That was the first thing I thought of too.
Sounds like he only does spot prints.

 

[jsf]

Frustrating.