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Guides

Everything we had to work out to build the tool, written down properly — screens, paper and relief printing. No sign-up, no gated PDFs.

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Halftone films without a RIP

How to produce print-ready 1-bit films without $500 software, and where the cheap routes go wrong.

Course

Ink mixing: the basics

A short course: what yellow + blue and red + blue make, tints, shades, mud and a repeatable method, with a mixing bench to play with.

Technique

Transparent inks and overprints

Two screens, three colours: what transparent inks do, what overprints add to your artwork, when they fail and how to prepare them.

Reference

DPI, PPI and LPI explained

What resolution artwork needs for screen printing, why vectors have no resolution, and how film DPI and mesh count relate.

Reference

Mesh count to LPI chart

Line frequency, dots per cm², smallest printable dot and tonal range for 110, 156 and 230 mesh.

Troubleshooting

Why your halftone dots wash out

Highlights vanishing and shadows filling in are physics. The four causes, in the order worth checking.

Setup

Printing films on an inkjet

Driver settings, film stock, scaling and how to judge density without a densitometer.

Paper

Screen printing on paper

Finer mesh, higher line frequency and almost no dot gain. What changes when you leave textile behind.

Relief

Lino and block printing layers

No dots to make: solid shapes per colour, mirroring for transfer, and registration between blocks.

Fundamentals

Color separation for screen printing

Spot colour versus index versus CMYK, and how to decide how few inks a design really needs.

AI artwork

AI image prompts for screen printing and lino

How to prompt Midjourney, ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion for flat, contrasting artwork that separates cleanly and screens to your mesh.

After separation

Using Canva with your PrintFilmReady films

What Canva is genuinely good for once your film is out — layout, labels, mockups — and which of its tools quietly turn a 1-bit film back into grey.

Prep

Prepare your artwork for your mesh, or for lino

Colour count, contrast, detail size and file format, checked before you separate, not after.

Setup

Printer settings: Epson, HP, Canon, Brother

The six driver settings that decide film density, and where each brand hides them.

Materials

Tracing paper or PVC film?

Why tracing paper prints a weaker black, how to fix it, and when the extra cost of PVC film is worth paying.

Dark garments

Underbase and halftones for dark garments

Why a halftone disappears into dark fabric without a white underbase, and the choke, mesh and flash settings that make it work.

Looking for something shorter? The blog covers quick tips and feature deep-dives between full guides.

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