The angle chart you find online is for a different process
Search “halftone angle” and you'll mostly get offset-printing CMYK charts: cyan at 15°, magenta at 75°, yellow at 0°, black (the key plate) at 45°. Those angles exist to keep four overlapping dot patterns from beating against each other and forming rosettes instead of mud. If you print one spot colour on paper with no periodic structure of its own — as offset does — 45° is a perfectly good angle for a single plate, because the eye is least sensitive to pattern near 45°.
A screen is not paper. It's a piece of woven fabric with its own repeating structure, and that structure is what actually decides the angle — not the CMYK chart, and not eye sensitivity.
Why a woven mesh has favourite angles at all
Mesh is threads at 0° (warp) crossing threads at 90° (weft): a square grid, repeating every 90°, with mirror symmetry at 0°, 45°, 90° and 135°. Lay a halftone screen on top at any of those four angles and every row of dots crosses the same relative point in the weave, over and over, in a low, visible beat frequency — that beat is moiré. It shows up as a coarse pattern superimposed on your artwork that has nothing to do with the image itself.
0° and 90° are the obvious ones to avoid: a dot row running parallel to a thread direction locks onto it immediately. 45° is the one people miss, because it's the “safe” angle everywhere else in printing. On a square grid it isn't safe at all — it's a symmetry axis of the weave, and dot rows at 45° interact with it just as regularly as they would at 0° or 90°.
| Angle | Relation to the mesh | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 0° / 90° | Parallel to warp or weft | Dot rows lock onto a single thread direction |
| 45° | Diagonal symmetry axis of the weave | Regular beat against both thread directions at once |
| 22.5° | Halfway between 0° and 45° | Maximum angular distance from every symmetry axis |
Why 22.5° exactly, not 20° or 30°
The weave repeats its symmetry every 45° (0°, 45°, 90°, 135°…), so the worst angles form a set spaced 45° apart. The angle that sits furthest from every member of that set, by simple geometry, is the one exactly halfway between two neighbouring symmetry axes — halfway between 0° and 45° is 22.5°. It's not a rounder or more convenient number picked for its own sake; it's the actual midpoint, which is why you'll see it quoted everywhere in screen printing and nowhere in offset litho.
Black: the mesh, fixed. Pink: one row of the halftone screen, rotating. It thickens and darkens the moment it lies parallel to a thread direction or the 45° diagonal — that is a row riding the weave — and thins back to a faint line as it turns away. 22.5° is the angle where it is thinnest.
What this means in practice
Nothing you have to do — that's the point. PrintFilmReady doesn't expose a halftone-angle setting, because there's only one correct answer for a single spot colour on a woven mesh, and offering it as a choice just adds a way to get it wrong. If you're building halftones by hand in Photoshop's bitmap dialog instead, this is the one setting worth checking before you burn a screen: 22.5°, round dot, every layer.
Multi-colour spot work doesn't need the CMYK four-angle dance either. Spot inks are printed as separate opaque layers, not blended optically the way process colour is, so each ink's screen only has to avoid the mesh — not the other inks. One angle, every colour, no rosette to manage.
Common questions
What halftone angle should I use for screen printing?
22.5 degrees, with a round dot. It's the angle furthest from 0, 45 and 90 degrees, which all align with a woven mesh's own grid and cause moiré.
Why not use 45 degrees like offset printing?
45 degrees is safe on plain paper, which has no periodic structure of its own. A screen-printing mesh does — it's a woven grid with symmetry at 0, 45, 90 and 135 degrees — so 45 degrees lines up with the weave instead of avoiding it.
Do I need different angles for each spot colour?
No. The CMYK four-angle system exists to stop overlapping process-colour dots interfering with each other. Spot inks print as separate opaque layers, so every colour can use the same 22.5-degree angle against the mesh.
Never think about the angle again
PrintFilmReady locks every halftone at 22.5° automatically — upload artwork, pick your mesh, and the angle is already right. Free while in beta.
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