Halftone Glow Effect for Printing

[NotRose97]

Hello! I’m an excited new Mac owner trying to replace my unaffordable Adobe knowledge with Pixelmator haha. I print shirts through Printful, and to get a good glow effect you need to half tone. I can only find a tutorial for photoshop but I know I should be able to do it in Pixelmator. I’ve gotten to the point where I use dot screen and false color with transparency for the first color and my desired color for the second, and that looks great, but the actual color of the dots is still fading out if I zoom in and I don’t know how that will impact print quality. Does anyone have experience with using half tone for this purpose and can give me some advice? Thank you so much!

[Aurelija]

Hey NotRose97! I believe for printing, you'd need your design to be vector-based? Or it doesn't matter? I think I've got a couple of ideas for both the raster and vector workflows but it would just be interesting to learn a bit more about what you're looking to achieve, exactly.

[Alan Thompson]

I don't know if it is bad practice to resurrect an abandoned thread, but I have the exact same question as the original poster. The designs do not have to be vector based; I use raster images for print-on-demand. I also struggle with getting a halftone effect without transparency in Pixelmator. Not only is this useful for a glow effect like the original poster mentioned, but it also is useful if you want the printed design to "fade out" at the edges. As you probably know, direct-to-garment printing first lays down a white layer of ink, then prints the design over it. This means any transparent pixels will not look right unless a true halftone is used.