What is Halftone Printing?
Halftone is a graphic technique using dots to simulate shading. Newspapers commonly use halftone printing to blend colors, and we use a similar process when screen printing. This technique is used to signi cantly reduce order costs by using only one color ink to print photographic or otherwise multi-tonal artwork. There are some examples of art on our website that contain halftones already, and we can use them when recreating your artwork to ensure your screen printed items resemble your original art as closely as possible while maintaining an affordable price.
The examples above show the various halftone opacities used. The higher the opacity (density of ink color), the larger dots, and less space between the dots of ink.
Halftones can also be used to create the illusion of an additional ink color. For example a red halftone on top of blue ink creates the illusion of a third ink color, purple.
While we do our best to show you the most accurate picture proof possible, we cannot recreate halftone effects in our proof images. Please reference these examples to get a better idea of what halftones will look like on your printed product. Proofed images are on the left, and the screen printed images are on the right.
Proofed Image Screen Printed Image
Proofed Image Screen Printed Image
This fox image is a perfect example of using two ink colors with halftones to create the illusion of an additional color. In this example, a black halftone is used on top of orange ink, creating the illusion of brown ink.
