: How do I recreate this halftone gradient border? I am having an issue with figuring out how to make the halftone border on this image: Does anyone have any idea how to do this? I'm trying

@Reiling762

Although it is possible to visually create the actual half-tone dots in the artwork file itself for screen printing, as posted in the answer from @Cai . It is seriously frowned upon and not recommended. The screen printing company must follow a certain formula for producing and printing half tones successfully. The main reason it is done this way is because the screen mesh used for the screen-printing... The thread count of the screen mesh (threads per inch) can interfere with the half tone pattern and create something what is called a moire pattern. In this image, you will see a moire pattern on the left side which is what the half tone printed with that undesirable pattern would look like and the right side of the image is what you would want the printed halftone to look like on the shirts.



There is only one way to avoid this Moire pattern in the final screen-print. The screen printing company must take the thread count of the mash (and just for an example we will use 156 mesh) and divide that number by 4.5 (personally I prefer 4.73 but the number 4.5 is a good starting point), which will then give us the number 34.6. That number 34.6 will be the value for the lpi frequency (lines per inch) which needs to be set up in the separation set up in the output sub menu of the print dialog window in Illustrator. In other words, it is the process of printing the actual separations for the screens, that will produce how large or small the halftone will print on the shirts.

So basically, to create halftones for screen printing in Illustrator, all colors should be created in the document as spot colors and what ever is meant to be half toned will be given just a percentage of what the solid spot color would be. In this next image the left rectangle is color 100% red and the right rectangle would be 50% half tone of red

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@Shelton719

This needs 3 layers + the background. Bottom layer (not the Background) is color and text. Text can be a little blurred and then have an unsharp mask to avoid too clinical outlook



In the middle layer there's texture. It's fully desaturated greyshade, masked off in the middle with a gradient and combined as hard ligt. The texture can be a real photo of canvas - not exactly clinically uniform, like the effects. I haven't it, so I inserted some skething brushstrokes from the filter gallery

On the top is the shade. Again BW and hard light. Glow effect was not satisfactory because the effect is deeper in left and right. This is a black fill from where a piece was cutted off to have a black elliptical ring that is little thicker at left and right. That ring was blurred and then deleted the exessive parts of the blur outside the plate area. The edge seems too round without sharpening. An unsharp mask corrects the roundness.

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@Berryessa866

(I'm pretty sure your example isn't a halftone but a texture over a gradient that looks a bit like a halftone; the image quality isn't great though and if you need this for screen printing then you do need a halftone...)

The following steps are essentially exactly the same in Illustrator & Photoshop.

Create your inner shadow as you normally would (it doesn't really matter how; I used an Inner Glow effect set to black with no blending). Importantly though, use a single ink color (i.e. for black, use 100k), otherwise you'll get a different halftone screen for each ink.



Effect → Pixelate → Color Halftone...

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