In this thread: "Outer Glow-not showing correctly on coloured products, help!" I mentioned that I used a dot effect to simulate a gradient on dark products. I got the idea from BigDot Effects. Thanks for sharing Vonster! Check out his other tutorials, he has some great tips.

So I created some designs with the BigDot Effect, as mentioned in the previous thread. Then I bought That's Just Weird on a black t-shirt. Then I photographed the shirt close up and posted the pictures on Flickr.

I am happy with the shirt and printing.

Here are the shots:
TJW T-Shirt #1 - Overall shot

TJW T-Shirt #2 - With ruler to show width

TJW T-Shirt #3 - With ruler to show height

TJW T-Shirt #4 - Lower dots, a bit rough

TJW T-Shirt #5 - Close up of upper print

TJW T-Shirt #6 - Vertical measurement of dots. They are about 1/32th" or 1/2mm in diameter.

TJW T-Shirt #7 - Horizontal measurement of dots

TJW T-Shirt #8 - Actual design (It was a PNG with transparency but it was flattened after uploading)

cdn_kin,

That really looks great! Thanks for sharing and taking the time to upload the various shots.

That technique could really bring some designs to life.

MP

Very cool, thank you, and love the Canadian asides. :P

Thanks for sharing this info. The specs you used on the dot effect, were they the same as the BigDot Effect tutorial suggested? 450 ppi, 25 lines/inch, 45 degree angle? I just had a very nasty suprise ordering a dark shirt with gradient and am trying to fix it. Thanks!

Thanks everyone.

StarChildTrilogy - I can't remember what specs I used, it was Sept. 7/07. But I do remember modifying them until I got large dots in the main part of the effect. I covered up some of the holes and I think I also removed some of the smaller dots to get the look I wanted. I created it in Photoshop but I only have Photoshop Elements and it won't let me check out some of the layers because I have Layer Effects on them (red dots with color overlay to make them yellow). It all depends on your blur and how smoothly or quickly it goes from black to white.

When you create the BigDot Effect you need to create a new document with the shape you want to make into dots so your original design is not affected. That is, you make a new document with the shape you need, blur it, then make it 1-bit or black and white which with the toning makes it into dots or squares, etc. When you bring it back into your design you need to make it RGB or whatever color space/mode you are using.

If you don't like how the effect looks you can adjust one of the parameters.

David

Hi,
The big dot effect looks great on a June 19th post. I am trying to get a my art to print cleanly on a dark color shirt. The art contains a large dot pattern to represent a halftone, but i am getting ghosting. In the past, a test print reaveled much more ghosting, fine white lines around many of the dots. I cleaned up the image and converted to a psd file with a transparent background. I m still getting a fine white line surrounding the edges of my letters. I can't afford to keep running test prints, but cannot see the fine white lines and ghosting in my psd file. Obviously I am trying to simlulate a silkscreened image, and not getting the results I want. I intend to upload 50 such images! Any suggestions? Thanks to all!

Make sure you are uploading as a PNG file. PSD is an appropriate working file and you should keep it as your working file, but "Save for the Web" as PNG-24 for your upload. (Ignore the "this image is too large message). And do the check for semi-transparency link posted in response to your other post.

The 'ghosting' sounds like the dot layer is still anti-aliased. It needs to be bitmap.
Save the dot layer to separate document and change it to bitmap (that is the magical part of the process, it makes the dots) to remove the anti-aliasing and then change it back to grayscale, then RGB. Then you can add it back to the your design.

or...

Your design started on a white background, got anti-aliased, and when you changed it to a black BG the anti-aliasing from the white BG is still hanging on.

David