It looked lovely on the screen....
Good artwork is still the main criterion. Resolution is the name for the amount of pixels in a file, so a 600 dpi file has 600 dots or packets of information per inch; a 150 dpi file has a 1/4 of the information.
Below are three files, exactly the same apart from one is 600 dpi, one is 150 dpiand the last is 96 dpi.
Many web images are at this level or less as they are smaller file sizes and take less time to load on a page
which was a concern in the early days but as technology makes faster broadband the speed of loading will become much less of an issue.
Below are three files, exactly the same apart from one is 600 dpi, one is 150 dpiand the last is 96 dpi.
Many web images are at this level or less as they are smaller file sizes and take less time to load on a page
which was a concern in the early days but as technology makes faster broadband the speed of loading will become much less of an issue.
600dpi
150dpi
96dpi, typical website/ thumbnail quality
As you can see, the lower resolution gives a jagged and fuzzy edge to the design which would show up in
both screen prints and digital printing.
both screen prints and digital printing.
PDF, EPS, CDR, DO RE MI, etc.....
The better your original art, the better the finished product. That's true of all methods: print, digital and embroidered.
We work in Windows 10 so any Mac files will need to be made capable of reading on the Windows format.
For bitmap images, PDF, JPEG etc, we think 600 dpi at the finished size will give you something as good as the original. 300 dpi is okay but much less and the jagged nature of the pixels will show up as steps in curves. As most website images are between 72 and 96 dpi and usually only a few centimetres wide that resolution is fixed: you can't increase it, you just get more dots. So anything designed for or taken from that platform is unlikely to give a good image on a t-shirt.
Vector images, CDR, AI, EPS are all scaleable so dpi is not important, although we ask for a PDF of the image to check as they don't always appear the same at our end as they do at yours.