In this video I will show you how to halftone an image for a dtf transfer on a white shirt. If you want to get great looking images with your DTF Graphics, learn how to utilize halftones. It's very important that you understand why halftones need to be used in dtf printing. Gradients that fade into the shirt color and drop shadows become semitransparent as they fade away. Any area in your design that uses transparency will not come out the way your image was designed because DTF transfers require white ink under every area of the design. The adhesive that is used for dtf transfers only sticks to white ink. Therefore, every area of your graphic will have a solid white base. An example would be if you are designing for black shirt and you're using 100% red in certain areas of your design but in other areas you use 50% red to achieve a darker red. The 50% red area is semi-transparent meaning that you can see through the red color and the black shirt is making the red darker. The 50% red area will not come out looking like you want it to because there is white under that area instead of the black t-shirt. If you halftone that area, it will simulate the darker red area because the shirt color shows through where there are no halftone dots.
In this video we are halftoning for a white shirt. The shirt color does play a part in how the overall image looks because the outer edges of the graphic fade into the shirt. The fades are appearing as grey. This is achieved by starting with 100% black and fading into a much lower percentage of black. That means the black and white are mixing and produce a grey color. The only way to achieve the effect is to use halftones. The print starts out solid black and then when it starts to fade, dots start printing. The dots start out big and get smaller as the image fades away. This leaves more area of the shirt showing so it appears as a lighter and lighter grey color. If you use the correct angle for the dot pattern, you will not be able notice that there are dots in those areas of your design. Screen printing and dtf printing is very similar as far as utilizing halftones to achieve the desired effect you are looking for.
We will dive deeper into this in other videos.