Press-Ready Vectors for Screen Printing

Because every ink color goes on press as its own screen, burned from its own film positive. To output those films you need artwork that resolves into flat, cleanly bounded color regions. A JPG logo fails at exactly that: its edges are anti-aliased into hundreds of in-between pixel shades that no separation can cleanly assign to one ink. A vector defines each region as a filled shape with a hard edge, so every ink pulls out as a solid, sharp film at any print size.

No, and we won't pretend it does. VectoSolve converts raster images into clean vector art with flat, merged colors — the step before separation. You pull the actual seps in Illustrator, CorelDRAW, or dedicated software like Separation Studio or AccuRIP, which is also where halftones, underbase, choke, and trapping happen. What VectoSolve fixes is the part that usually eats your time: getting from the file the customer sent to art those tools can actually separate.

A vectorization or "art fee" of roughly $15–40 per job is common industry practice, and overnight vector services charge per file and cost you a day of turnaround. Nothing about using VectoSolve changes what you bill — it changes how long the redraw takes. A conversion runs in well under a minute instead of 30–90 minutes of pen-tool work.

Most spot-color jobs run 1 to 6 inks. Every color you keep is another screen to coat, expose, register, and reclaim, so fewer is cheaper and faster. VectoSolve's post-processing merges near-duplicate shades into single flat fills, so a 4-color logo comes out as 4 usable regions instead of 40 slightly-different ones — but the final call on the ink count is yours, made in your separation software.

Screens can't print continuous tone — a gradient has to become a halftone, a pattern of dots in one ink. Photorealistic jobs on dark garments are usually run as simulated process: 6–10 opaque inks halftoned from high-resolution raster art by a separator. Don't vectorize a photo for those jobs; keep it raster (upscale it if the source is small). Vectorization is for the spot-color work — logos, text, mascots, flat illustration — which is most of what walks into a shop.

On typical garment mesh, keep positive strokes at roughly 1 pt (about 0.35 mm) or heavier and text at about 8 pt and up at final print size. Knocked-out (reverse) detail needs to be bigger still, because plastisol likes to bridge thin gaps in the stencil. If the job genuinely needs finer detail, that's a higher mesh count decision — 230 and up — not something any file format can fix on 110 mesh.

Downloading on this page gives one ZIP holding the same artwork four ways: EPS, SVG, PDF, and PNG. Paying by card sends the EPS itself to your download link. EPS is the safe handoff for CorelDRAW and Illustrator separation workflows, PDF opens anywhere, the SVG covers newer tools, and the PNG is there for the approval email. All exports carry commercial-use rights, so files you prep for customer jobs are covered.