This is a texture, not a printing film
Worth being precise about, because the words are the same and the jobs are not. What this makes is a halftone you can see: an effect applied to artwork, for the look of it.
A screen printing film needs something else — a 1-bit halftone at a line frequency your mesh can physically hold, with the highlights and shadows clipped to what survives washout. Apply this effect and then screen it for print, and you get two patterns on top of each other, which is how moiré happens. If you are heading for a press, set this much coarser than your press halftone, or skip it entirely and let the film tool do the screening.
Why the tone correction matters
Take a plain round dot and threshold it against a coverage value, which is what most halftone filters do. Ask for 50% and you get a dot covering roughly 78% of its cell, because dot area does not grow linearly with the threshold. Everything drifts darker and the midtones collapse.
This tool builds a lookup of the spot function's actual distribution and maps requested coverage onto printed area, accurate to about a tenth of a percentage point across the range. It is the same correction that runs inside the film tool, and it is the reason cheap halftones look muddy while good ones do not.
What the controls do
- Coarseness sets the cell size in pixels. Bigger cells mean bigger, more visible dots.
- Strength blends the effect with the original image. At 100% you get pure pattern; lower values keep some of the underlying picture.
- Tone pushes the whole image lighter or darker before screening, which is the quickest way to rescue an image that comes out too heavy.
The screen angle is fixed at 22.5°. On a press that avoids interference with the weave of the mesh; here it simply looks better than a grid squared up to the edges.
Common questions
Is this the same as the halftone on a screen printing film?
No. This applies a halftone as a visual effect to your artwork. A printing film needs a 1-bit halftone at a line frequency your mesh can actually hold, which is a different calculation — and applying both would give you a screen on top of a screen, and moiré.
Why does this halftone look cleaner than other online generators?
It linearises tone. A plain round-dot halftone prints 50% coverage as roughly 78% dot area, which is why most free generators come out darker and muddier than expected. This one corrects for it, so 50% reads as 50%.
Can I use the result for screen printing?
You can separate it and print it, yes — but treat the texture as artwork, not as screening. Set the line frequency here well coarser than your press halftone, or you will get two overlapping patterns.
Is anything uploaded?
No. The image never leaves your browser; all the processing happens on your own machine.
Making films, not textures?
PrintFilmReady separates artwork into inks and screens each one to your mesh count — registration marks, labelled margins, one ZIP. Free while in beta.