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The first step in every shop’s printing process? Getting the art dialed in. Art & Design Software For Screen Printing It’s important to note that you can use high-resolution rasters for printing, but your prints are as good as the printer used to create the screens. If you use vector images, your prints will have well-defined lines and sharp edges instead of pixels. Most crucially, vector images can be resized and manipulated infinitely without losing picture quality. They typically come as EPS, SVG and AI or CD file types. Vector images are ideal for screen printing. It’s NOT made of the location and color of specific pixels! Vector images may seem like magic, but the idea is simple: the image is encoded as the mathematical relationship between the different shapes that the image is made of. The image details remain sharp no matter the scale. Vector images don’t use pixels, so the image doesn’t lose quality when it’s resized or manipulated. Raster images cannot be resized or manipulated without losing quality.ĭon’t be surprised if you need to convert raster images to vector images while screen printing. Raster images have jagged edges that may be visible when printed. Screen printers typically avoid printing raster images. Raster images are typically JPG, PNG, TIFF or GIF file format.
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This means that as you zoom in or manipulate the image, you lose quality. At a high enough resolution, raster images appear smooth to the human eye.īut, raster images degrade in quality as the resolution increases. Raster images are a specific arrangement of thousands of pixels. The most common image format that you see on the internet is a raster image.īut for screen printing, we often need to use vector images. Raster Imagesīefore you ever screen print a single shirt, you must understand the difference between vector and raster images.
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BONUS: 27 Software Tools for Screen Printing.
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