Halftones 101

In screen printing, we can get different shades or gradients of colors using a technique called halftones. What are halftones? I’m glad you asked! Halftones are small dots of a color. The bigger & closer together these dots are, the darker or brighter the color appears. The smaller & more spread out they are, the lighter the color will appear. When viewed at a distance, the area with halftones will visually blend together & appear to be a different shade than the solid ink areas.

 

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We can’t accurately show on our proofs how the halftones will look when printed. This is due to the fact screen resolution of monitors is limited to 72 dots per inch. Our hafltone dots need about 300 dots per inch of resolution to show up well.