How to Screen Print Halftones "Step By Step"

yo what's up guys hope you guys are doing well welcome back to my youtube channel i'm brema and in today's episode i'll be teaching you guys how to screen print halftone effect [Music] uh so everything from uh transferring a photo realistic image to bitmap onto on photoshop and then sending that out to get burnt onto a screen and then finally getting to screen print uh in-house which is usually the fun part for me uh experimenting with the the printing technique hopefully you guys enjoy this episode uh stay tuned and uh hopefully you learned something from this all right guys so we'll dive into the first few steps to getting uh your image ready for uh transparency so the burning stage i start off by selecting you know the type of image that you want to make and then open up photoshop so far i have two images selected uh so i'm gonna open up photoshop the way i like i like to do this by just opening up like file new and then making sure your resolution is at uh 300 here and i like to work by inches because that's where dimensions so let's say tutorial for youtube um and then here a lot of time most screens uh the screens that i like to use are 20 by 24 inches so i'll just make sure that the the dimension are the same so 20 by 24 great so this is basically my screen here so i'm gonna go open up my folder uh drag the two images that i like here and then uh size size them up to however um usually there's like small things that i've learned along the way so like for t-shirt a lot of times you know you have like four four fingers before like the graphic starts uh and then and then by knowing that i could kind of get an idea of like how big i want the graphic to be uh so i work mainly with t-shirts it's kind of like my canvas so but you could print these on any any surface any flat surface that you'd want to so let's start off by just um i think i would want it to be around like maybe 10 inches so i there that looks it looks pretty good so i'll just enter um and then here's the other image i'll make this one say maybe maybe 12 inches so something like that's good uh and we're gonna we're gonna print both image on one screen just to save us a bit of like i guess money um and a lot of times you just wanna flip your image so that you have you could tape one side print one and then once you're done printing you can just tape it and then rotate your screen to the to the other ones just a simple way to like save save money on on burning uh gonna just rotate this image okay that looks that looks pretty good and then and then the next step is just converting the image onto into making it black and white so grayscaling it mode grayscale uh this is gonna like flatten everything okay so everything is black and white right now um usually i would save this as as this reference so file save as and a lot of times with most of the files that i work with i try to save everything as pdf just so when you send it out like things don't end up changing or changing uh size or anything like that so i'll save this one as photoshop pdf um it's all labeled 20x24 save okay save pdf um and then next up to i just i just saved it as just black and white image just in case so some some uh places that burn screen for you like would they like to do the the bit mapping themselves so i i just usually would send them that option too but i'm gonna go ahead now and and bitmap it uh and this is you do this by going on image mode bitmap i usually have the output at 300 um okay and then i like to just mess around with these um right now it's at like 65 i'll probably let's try maybe a few different ones let's try 30 for the frequency as you could see [Music] when i zoom in everything is like detailed out but the dots seem to be a little bit bigger so i'm just gonna i'm gonna redo it one more time maybe try a higher number just to see if i could get more detail here so command z and then i'll try that one more time okay um let's try 50. cool so seems like there's more detail now so the higher number uh the more detail it is this one's a bit funky because there's a lot there's a lot of uh different shades of of black here there's a lot of grays here and then there's darker so this would be a good test to see how how well this will uh i guess translate uh to screen so everything looks good here i'm gonna just save it and get it ready uh as you guys know like i don't i don't currently have the access to burn screens in-house so i send it out but if if you're doing this in-house there's we have a few other videos you can reference on how we burn our screens and how we wash it out and every everything like that these are gonna get burnt at a higher count mesh so something around like maybe 180 or 200 maybe the higher the higher the mesh the more finer detail you should get so with a lot of images when you have so much detail it means you just have a lot a lot of like dots in your image file so you want to just go with a higher mesh count but but the best the best way to like learn these things is to just keep trying different meshes i know like when you burn 110 it's usually for like more bolder graphics 160 you can get a little bit more detail but the higher the higher the mesh count the more detail you can get but if you guys are uh have your own like burning places just i'll just say experiment as much as you can just so you can get a a better grasp on uh screen printing and also just what what different count mesh can achieve so i'll save this one again same things save it on my computer as pdf i'll probably rename this one i'll include the mesh count on the mesh 200 on the file name so save perfect okay cool okay so the next step from here is uh sending the file over to uh the screen printing shop that's gonna burn it for us so we're so we don't do that in-house uh and a lot of time i think some of the benefits that we get from sending the files out is it's going to get processed by a professional someone who's gonna you know not mess up and i know i know like throughout my whole journey of screen printing there was a time where i would mess up a lot of screens so it was very discouraging but right now the fact that we don't have access to a dark room and we can just send this out and pay somebody else to handle it and if they messed up of course they're a professional shop they'll like they'll replace the screen and everything like that so that's one up up uh i guess positive for for sending stuff out um so we'll do that we'll prep it uh we'll send it to mick logan which they're like right down the street from us and then next day we could pull up and just pick up the screen ready to go all right guys so basically when you're sending out the email just make sure you have every everything detailed in there you want to give them as much detail as possible so for me i attached the grayscale version and also the bitmap just in case one doesn't work and if they prefer using the other one that way and i make sure everything is sized and ready to go so i'm going to send out the email and then uh we'll pick up tomorrow because that's when they'll have it done and then we'll check in then all right guys so it's the next day and we got the screen made as you can see here the images are burnt into the screen i'll just show you guys a quick comparison between uh a vector graphic which is more fine uh you could see like the lines are very like fine on this um and then on a half tone image it's just more dotted uh kind of low low resolution uh you could see dots throughout the whole image um so it's kind of just the same process i just wanted to show you guys a quick example so the next thing i'm going to do is set the screen up and then we could start testing the prints [Music] all right guys so basically once you have your screen all ready to go my technique that i i like to do with these half tones is just pulling so lightly pulling and then applying a lot of pressure okay let's see what this looks like um mean right away like the contrast is pretty nice i could see the screen print uh kind of the studio i don't know what this streak here is so i'll probably run another test print before uh before it's like perfectly good to go so i'll just dry this one and then run in that sample [Music] [Music] one of the better ones all right so as you guys could see took me probably around eight tries probably more to kind of get an idea of like how uh the type of process for me uh right now i'm just gonna pull i'm just gonna flood it and then pull with a lot of pressure that seemed to give me like the perfect result for me uh so the whole thing with screen printing i think it's just like a lot of like trial and error you just want to make sure you're dialing in your your processes before you could run a production so that's why i'm taking doing a lot of like samples on these sheets of paper so as you guys can see this one came out pretty good it's kind of exactly what i was like hoping for you have like a really nice darker tone here in the shadow referencing back to the image this is kind of like exactly what it looks like there's still like you get details and then there's a bunch of different tonals of gray within the image that i like compared to some of these other ones these came out pretty dark i think i was just pushing too hard on the on the squeegee and then this one the the the first few ones had like these little streaks of water it's probably from watching the screen but um on the final production uh there's no there's no sign of that in here all right so now since i have the the the great tampo that i i like i'm gonna just run it on a t-shirt uh we're just gonna do one t-shirt for the for this tutorial but usually when i'm running production with kind of like these half tones i'll just make sure maybe print 10 at a time and just making sure my screen is still good and there's not much flooding of ink because a lot of time uh ink tend to like bleed uh under and then you kind of don't get the desired look you're going for so so same thing flooding and then [Music] i mean just look looking at the final result everything looks good as far as the print and and the contrast that i'm looking for there's a good range of dark and light within the image you could see everything clearly i could almost see like some of the stickers that were on the screen print um and yeah every every small details in there is uh prevalent so i think this one this one's good so the next thing we're gonna do is print the camera one uh hopefully i'll grab another i'll do i'll do i'll do a few sample runs before i could print it on a t-shirt just to kind of get a comparison of like the two different images [Music] yeah i'm gonna plug this thing back on [Music] all right now i have the camera the mamiya rz ready um same process i mean i feel like i kind of got in the groove i have an idea of like what this is going to look like so i'm just going to flood and then pull with more pressure god here let me just clean this up real quick just like that that one came out really good uh it's almost perfect i just see a little bit of a inconsistency right here uh but for our first try this looks really good almost look three-dimensional from afar [Music] so tonight [Music] [Music] dude this is pretty cool actually um yeah just by observation um i feel like i really like this one because there's there's a lot of uh i guess shades of greys in here and highlights and whatnot you can almost see it looks more realistic than this one this one has much darker um and i lost a few details here i think the screen was just flooded um so something between these two there's a streak here that that i didn't like so i might uh if if i were to run production i'll probably do a few other more tests before i could run some uh a production so for this one i would just try to get it as close to this one as possible without this streak here but sometimes after after you print for a while for a longer time uh the ink tend to like bleed more onto the screen which makes it a little darker sometimes yeah on compared to those two much better compared to the first one i did on the front here all right so these are some of the other larger images that we've done in the past uh as you could see on these ones uh the the holes are much much larger because it's a larger image uh the bigger the bigger the image uh sometime the the whole passage for the ink are much larger um but yeah these were these are fun to print i think i think one thing with half tones you could go as crazy as you want because you could enlarge the image as big as you want or as small as you want and you still kind of get the same picture-like quality on these i'll show you guys some of the other smaller ones we've done in the past so in comparison to the basquiat one this one is a smaller image uh as you could see it's much finer uh since it's much smaller uh you you almost can't even tell you can't even see the holes in these because they're so tiny but with this one it's very prevalent [Music] so [Music] sick wow [Music] in our building [Music] whoa that's probably one of the coolest shirts [Music] so cool wow [Music] so [Music] all right so if you guys made it to the end of the video i really appreciate you guys watching all the way through i hope you picked up something new from this video uh as you could see like screen printing to me it's just a bunch of like experimenting you try a bunch of different ways of of doing things and you find you find ones that work and you find some that don't really translate as well uh so just experiment as much as you can uh and also stay hungry there's a lot of uh we've put a lot of youtube videos on just tutorials on how to burn screens i know in this on this video specifically we didn't go through that process we outsourced it uh but if you could you could reference back to our channel there's how to burn screens and kind of like doing everything from step one to uh completion so make sure to go check that out uh feel free to leave a like to this video if you learned something leave a comment below it does help a lot to get this video out to more people again subscribe stay tuned for more

Channel: Brema

Views: 145,991

Keywords: how to screen print halftones, screen printing, photoshop tutorial, how to print on tshirts, how to screen print photos, streetwear brand, clothing brand, 160mesh screen, 180mesh screen, unfinished legacy

Id: _QdUF2p52rM

Length: 24min 12sec (1452 seconds)

Published: Fri May 13 2022