: How to put a photo on a t-shirt using illustrator Does anyone know how to put a photo onto a t-shirt (colour and black and white) without losing to much quality and how to get it ready

@Debbie163

The first thing to consider:

If you plan on selling a t-shirt with the face of a celebrity on it, you can't! You need to get permission for this or buy commercial rights for such a picture.

In general, don't use Google search to find pictures if you plan to print it on a product and to sell it. Even "free pictures" online cannot be trusted because some websites redistribute the work of others without permission or offer very limited permissions on how to use them. You can't sell or use what's not yours. Find stock picture websites, read the terms and licenses, take your own pictures or create your own illustrations for this.

Quality of the picture:

Web pictures often don't have the right amount of pixels to be used for large prints. When you look at a picture online, you need to imagine that this picture can usually be used for a printing project 3-4 times smaller than what you see on your web browser.

Since you want to print on t-shirt, you can use a lower quality image and cheat a bit on the size; transfer on t-shirt isn't the same quality as offset printing on paper for example. It's not as sharp.

The resolution of the picture depends on the method you'll use. In general, you need 300ppi but if you use a vector, there's no resolution to worry about.

To know what size and resolution (quality) the picture should be, ask your printer or look on the online on their websites.

Where to print:

Online print-on-demand:

For photos, you can use online printers and sometimes you can also find kiosks in shopping malls where they offer quick t-shirt printing services. You can keep the picture as it is but ideally use a resolution of 300ppi in Photoshop for best results. The best is to simply ask them what kind of file they need and how big it should be. In general, you can print an image about 14" x 14" in average (35cm x 35cm) but dimension may vary depending on the printer you use. One important point is that the technique to print this doesn't always offer an opaque transfer method; you might not be able to print a grayscale image on a black t-shirt and sometimes you cannot print with white! The white areas will in fact be transparent. So that may limit you to print on t-shirt with lighter colors than your picture.

The best is to look online and read about each provider; some might offer you very high quality printing with opaque printing, some don't. For the file preparation, read their requirements and specifications online, they all have specific ones. Sometimes you can download templates.

Examples of online print-on-demand t-shirt:


Zazzle
Cafepress
Vistaprint
Teespring


Do-it-yourself solution

You can also buy transfer paper in a office supplies shop and print it using your own inkjet printer. The results are sometimes good but as you guess it's not a commercial quality,and you'll be limited by the paper size and also the same issue with the color of the print+shirt as I mentioned above.

With these 2 methods above, you can print JPG, PNG and pretty much any kind of formats from Photoshop or Illustrator.

Commercial t-shirt printing

Finally, if you need a commercial quality and can order more than 1 t-shirt, you can use screen-printing. You will need to order a minimum quantity of t-shirt but you will also have more freedom with the colors. They can print real black and white prints on t-shirts and the ink will be opaque. The difficulty is that you will need a good quality image and you might need to prepare your file according to the requirements of the printer. For example, you might need to clearly separate the white part of the print from the black part, and make sure your white part serves as a base for the black part that will be printed on top of it. That can be done in Photoshop.

There's no limits in dimensions. Look in the yellow pages to find a t-shirt printer in your area and ask for quotes + file specifcations.

About Illustrator and printing pictures on a t-shirt:

You mentioned Illustrator: In Illustrator, your image will be converted to vectors; you'll need to find a tutorial to find how. Opening an image in Illustrator won't make it a vector and you might as well just stick to Photoshop in this case.

You can't really create a totally realistic picture without some work if you convert the picture to vectors. The picture will look more like an illustration in vector but it's a lot simpler to separate your colors with Illustrator than Photoshop, and the quality is always maximum no matter the size. Maybe a vector is not something you want to use for a picture.

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@Goswami567

three methods I can think of:
1. make a PDF--go to a mall--find a kiosk T-shirt printer--ask them to put image on T shirt.
2. go to www.cafepress.com/ follow instructions for uploading and ordering custom T shirt.
3. find a silk screen shop in your area--contact them about acceptable art--pay lots of cash

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