Screen Print File Converter — Spot-Color Vectors from Any Artwork

Every colour in a screen-printed job is a screen: another burn, another setup, another registration, another wash. So the number that decides whether a job is profitable is not resolution, it is how many distinct colours came out of the trace.

This is where automatic conversion quietly ruins files. A logo a human would separate into four spot colours often comes back from a tracer with twelve to twenty, because anti-aliased edges and JPEG artefacts create dozens of near-identical shades that look like one colour on screen. We measured our own output on a sample of production files and a quarter of them exceeded sixteen colours before we tightened the merge.

Check it before you quote: open the file and look at the swatch list. If a single logo colour is spread across eight nearly identical entries, the file needs merging, not printing.

Being precise about this saves arguments later.

What you get here: clean closed paths, merged spot colours, correct fill rules so counters stay open, and export in the formats your RIP and your art department actually read — EPS and AI included, not only SVG.

What you do not get, and should not expect: white underbase generation, halftone screens, trapping, or choke and spread. Those are separation decisions that depend on your ink, mesh, substrate and press. No tracer makes them, and any tool claiming it does is selling you something you will have to redo.

The honest division of labour: the converter removes the forty minutes spent cleaning up a customer JPG. Your separator still separates.

Most bad screen-print jobs are decided before anyone opens the artwork, at the moment the customer emails a screenshot and calls it their logo.

Ask one thing back: do you have the file your logo was made in, or a PDF from whoever designed it? Nine times out of ten it exists, and it turns the job from a rescue into a routine.

When it genuinely does not exist, the resolution of what they do have decides everything. Above 1024 px on the short side you are usually fine. Below 256 px a redraw is cheaper than the argument you will have about print quality afterwards. Telling the customer that at intake reads as expertise. Telling them after the shirts are printed reads as an excuse.