If you've gotten quotes from multiple screen printers, you've probably noticed that no two shops price the same way. One shop quotes you $5.00 per shirt plus a $150 setup fee. Another quotes $8.50 per shirt with no setup fee at all. A third charges a low print price but marks up the garments. It can be confusing, and it's tempting to compare just the per-shirt price and assume the lower number is the better deal. It usually isn't that simple.

Every screen printing shop has the same basic costs: screens, emulsion, ink, garment blanks, labor, equipment, and overhead. How they package those costs into a quote is where the variation happens. Some shops break out a separate setup fee that covers screen creation and press setup, then charge a lower per-piece price for the actual printing. Other shops roll everything into one per-piece price with no setup line item. Some mark up the garments significantly and keep the print price lower. Some keep the garment close to wholesale and charge more for the printing. The math behind the quote is different, but the total cost of the finished order is what you're actually paying.

Here's an example. Shop A quotes 50 shirts at $5.00 each plus $150 in setup fees. That's $400 total, or $8.00 per finished shirt. Shop B quotes the same 50 shirts at $8.50 each with no setup fee. That's $425 total, or $8.50 per finished shirt. Shop A's per-shirt price looked cheaper, but the total order cost is only $25 apart. And if the garment quality, print quality, or turnaround time differs between the two, that $25 gap might not mean what you think it means.

The point is to look at the final price for the complete order, not any single line item. Ask what the total cost is for X quantity on the garment you want, printed the way you want it, delivered when you need it. That's the number that matters.

January and February are the slowest months in screen printing. Most shops are coming off the holiday rush and the spring event season hasn't kicked in yet. The presses aren't buried under a pile of orders, which means your job gets more attention, more time, and fewer chances of being rushed through to make room for the next one in line.

It's also when you're most likely to get a better deal. Shops want to keep their presses running. A press sitting idle is overhead with no revenue, so many printers are more flexible on pricing during the slow months to keep work flowing. If you know you're going to need shirts for a spring event, a summer league, or a product launch later in the year, ordering in January or February instead of waiting until the last minute gets you a less stressed printer, potentially lower pricing, and a turnaround that isn't competing with every other order that came in the same week.

Vector files are built from mathematical paths. They're created in programs like Adobe Illustrator and saved as .AI, .EPS, or .SVG files. Because the shapes are defined by equations rather than pixels, they can be scaled to any size without losing sharpness. A vector logo looks identical at one inch and at twelve inches. This is the ideal file type for screen printing because the stencil needs crisp, defined edges at the actual print size.

Raster files are built from a grid of pixels. JPGs, PNGs, and TIFFs are all raster formats. At the size they were created, they look fine. Scale them up and the pixels stretch, and the edges go soft. A logo that's 300 pixels wide on a website will fall apart at print size because there isn't enough data in the file to fill a 12-inch wide chest print. We can work with high-resolution raster files, but they need to be at least 300 DPI at the actual print size. That means if your print will be 12 inches wide, the file needs to be at least 3,600 pixels across. Most images pulled from a website or social media are 72 to 150 DPI, which looks fine on a phone but produces a blurry stencil at print scale.

Send the original design file whenever possible. If it was built in Illustrator or CorelDRAW, send the native file. If the only version that exists is a small JPG from a website, it will likely need to be redrawn before it can be printed cleanly.

On a computer, adding another color to a design costs nothing. In screen printing, every color requires its own screen: a separate stencil that has to be created, registered to the press, and printed in sequence. A one-color print on a white shirt is one screen, one setup, and a clean job. A six-color print with an underbase on a dark shirt is seven screens, seven passes, and a significantly more complex setup with tighter registration tolerances.

More colors doesn't automatically mean a better-looking shirt. Some of the strongest screen printed designs we've ever produced are one or two colors on a well-chosen blank. A single color on a Comfort Colors 1717 in Chambray looks clean and retail-ready without any complexity. Meanwhile, a design with eight colors that wasn't properly separated for screen printing can end up looking muddier than a simpler version would have. When you're designing for screen printing specifically, working within a controlled color count from the beginning tends to produce a sharper result than designing without limits and trying to reduce later.

Screen printing can't do continuous tones. Each color is a single ink pushed through a single screen. To simulate a gradient, the design gets converted into halftones: a pattern of dots that vary in size. Large dots where the tone is dark, smaller dots where it fades, with the fabric or underbase showing through the gaps. From a normal viewing distance the eye blends the dots into what looks like a smooth fade. Up close, you can see the pattern. That's normal.

The fineness depends on mesh count. A 230-mesh holds finer dots than a 110, but finer dots mean thinner ink and less opacity. Designs with gentle, gradual fades across large areas translate well. Tight transitions in a small space tend to posterize into visible steps. Give your gradients room to breathe and they'll print clean.

This is the step that most guides skip over, and it's one of the most important parts of the entire process. Color separation is the work of taking a finished design and breaking it apart into individual layers, one for each screen that will be used on press. Every color, every shade, every gradient gets assigned to a specific channel that will become its own film positive and its own screen. The quality of the separation determines the quality of the print. A bad separation can't be saved by good printing.

There are several separation methods, and the right one depends entirely on the design.

Spot color separation is the most common and the most used in the industry. It's what you use for logos, text, line art, and designs with solid, defined colors. Each color in the design gets its own screen. A three-color logo gets three separations. The work is usually done in Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW, and it's relatively clean as long as the design was built properly in vector format. Where spot color gets complicated is when overlapping colors need to be trapped, meaning the edges are slightly expanded or contracted so small registration shifts on press don't create gaps of bare fabric between colors. A spot color design with halftone shading in it, like a logo with a gradient fade, still gets separated as spot color but now the gradient has to be converted into a halftone dot pattern within that color's channel.

CMYK process separation uses four colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) to simulate a full range of color through overlapping halftone dots, the same principle as a magazine print. It works well for photographic images on white or light-colored garments. The inks are transparent and they layer over each other to create the illusion of thousands of colors from just four. The limitations are real though. CMYK inks are translucent, so they don't work on dark garments without major modification. The color gamut is narrower than what you see on an RGB monitor, which means some colors just can't be reproduced. And it's unforgiving on press. Slight pressure or registration changes affect the dot interaction and shift the whole color balance. CMYK used to be the go-to for photorealistic printing, but it's been largely replaced by simulated process for garment work.

Simulated process separation, sometimes called sim process, is what most shops use for complex, multicolor, or photorealistic artwork. Instead of CMYK's four transparent inks, sim process uses six to ten opaque spot colors in halftone patterns that overlap and blend to create a full-color image. The colors are regular plastisol inks, mixed to specific shades (a flesh tone, a sky blue, a forest green) chosen to match the dominant colors in the artwork. Because the inks are opaque, sim process works on both light and dark garments, which is why it has largely replaced CMYK in the garment industry.

The catch is that simulated process separations are hard. They're done manually in Photoshop, channel by channel, and the separator has to understand how halftone dots of different colors interact when they overlap on fabric. Software like Separation Studio and T-Seps can automate parts of it, but even with software, manual adjustments are almost always needed. A complex sim process separation can take hours. Color accuracy tops out around 70 to 80 percent of what you see on the monitor, because physical ink on cotton behaves differently than light on a screen. The separation work is typically a one-time fee that ranges from $100 to $200 depending on complexity, and once it's done, the files are saved for any future reprints of the same design.

Index color separation uses a grid of same-size square dots instead of traditional halftone dots. Each dot is a single color, and the dots sit next to each other rather than overlapping. It's easier to print than sim process because there's no dot-on-dot interaction to worry about, but it typically requires more screens to achieve the same color range, and the results can look slightly pixelated up close. It works on light and dark garments and it's forgiving on press, which makes it a good option for shops that want full-color printing without the difficulty of sim process registration.

The separation method affects the number of screens, the difficulty of the press setup, the time on press, and the final cost. A two-color spot separation and an eight-color simulated process separation are completely different jobs even if the finished shirts look equally good from across the room. This is why design choices made early in the process, things like color count and whether gradients are necessary, have a direct impact on what happens in the screen room and what shows up on the invoice.

There's a gap between what looks good on screen and what translates well to a printed garment, and most graphic designers don't think about it because nobody taught them to. Design school teaches color theory, typography, composition, and branding. It doesn't usually teach how those decisions affect production cost and printability when the logo eventually ends up on a t-shirt. And it almost always does.

Here's a common example. A graphic designer creates a logo for a lawn care company. It looks great on the business card and the website. It has six colors: two greens, a brown, a yellow, a white, and a black outline. On a computer, those six colors cost nothing. In screen printing, those six colors mean six screens, six passes on press, and a per-shirt cost that makes the lawn care company's eyes go wide when they get the quote. They wanted shirts under $10 each. A six-color print on a dark shirt puts them well past $15. The designer didn't do anything wrong from a design standpoint. They just didn't design with production in mind.

A graphic designer who understands screen printing would build that same logo with two or three colors from the start. Not because they can't use six, but because they know the logo is going to end up on shirts, hats, bags, and signage where fewer colors means lower cost and a cleaner look at print scale. They'd build it in vector format so it scales to any size without losing quality. They'd avoid fine hairline strokes that disappear on mesh. They'd design gradients that can be converted to halftones without turning to mud. These aren't limitations. They're the difference between a design that looks good on a monitor and a design that looks good on everything it touches.

The translation from digital to print is where a lot of designs run into trouble. A shadow effect that looks natural in Photoshop becomes a complex halftone on a screen. A gradient that fades to nothing on a monitor needs a hard edge somewhere on fabric because the ink has to stop. Thin lines that look crisp at 100% zoom on a retina display spread and thicken when pushed through mesh. Colors that look distinct side-by-side on an RGB monitor can look nearly identical when mixed as physical inks. Every one of these issues is solvable, but they're easier and cheaper to solve at the design stage than after the screens are already burned.

If you're a graphic designer building a brand identity that will eventually be screen printed, the single best thing you can do is keep your color count low, build everything in vector, and test your design at actual print size in a single color on a dark background. If it reads clearly in that scenario, it will print beautifully. If it falls apart, the design needs work before it ever gets to a printer.

Fabric weight is measured in ounces per square yard. A 4.2 oz shirt uses less cotton per unit of fabric than a 6.1 oz shirt. The lighter shirt will feel thinner, drape closer to the body, and generally have a more fashion-forward fit. The heavier shirt will feel more substantial, hold its shape better after repeated washing, and tend to have a more traditional, boxy fit.

From a printing standpoint, lighter-weight fabrics can be trickier. The thinner material stretches more easily on the platen, which can cause registration issues on multicolor prints. It also absorbs preheat faster, which affects flash timing. Heavier fabrics provide a more stable printing surface but require slightly more heat to cure through the thicker material. Neither is difficult for an experienced printer, but the garment weight does change the approach at several points in the process.

There's a temptation to go cheap on blanks to keep the per-piece cost down. We understand the math. But the blank is what your customer wears every day. They put it on, they feel it against their skin, they wash it and see whether it shrinks or pills or falls apart. The print might look great, but if the shirt itself is uncomfortable or deteriorates after five washes, the overall impression of the product is negative. Nobody says "the print held up great but the shirt fell apart, so I'll order again." They just stop ordering.

Premium blanks from brands like Bella Canvas, Comfort Colors, and Independent Trading Co. cost more per unit. But they hold their shape, they feel better against the skin, the colors stay consistent across dye lots, and the finished product looks like something a customer would actually choose to buy off a retail shelf. That perception of quality reflects directly on the brand whose logo is on the chest. A $3 shirt with a $5 print job gives you an $8 shirt that looks like an $8 shirt. A $6 shirt with the same $5 print job gives you an $11 shirt that looks like it could sell for $30. The extra $3 per unit does more for a brand's image than almost any other investment in the project.

Heather garments are made from a blend of dyed and undyed fibers that create a speckled, textured appearance. They're popular for their lived-in look, but they present unique challenges for screen printing. The blended fiber composition means the fabric surface is uneven at a microscopic level. Some fibers absorb ink and some don't. Some sit higher than others. The result is that ink coverage on a heather fabric will never look as smooth and solid as the same ink on a solid-dyed shirt.

On heather garments, the fiber texture shows through the print, especially in larger solid areas. Fine text and detailed line work can get lost in the noise of the fabric texture. Designs with some visual complexity, where the pattern of the fabric blends into the design rather than competing with it, tend to work better on heathers than large solid shapes. If your design is a big, bold, single-color logo and you want it to look perfectly clean and uniform, a solid-dyed garment will give you better results than a heather every time.

Mesh count refers to the number of threads per inch in the screen fabric. A 110-mesh screen has 110 threads per inch. A 230-mesh screen has 230. The higher the mesh count, the finer the weave and the smaller the openings between threads. This directly controls how much ink passes through to the garment.

Lower mesh counts like 86 and 110 have larger openings and deposit more ink. They're used for white ink underbases, specialty inks like puff and high density, and situations where you need heavy ink coverage. Higher mesh counts like 200, 230, and 305 have smaller openings and deposit less ink. They produce finer detail, sharper halftones, and softer prints because there's simply less ink sitting on the fabric. The tradeoff is opacity. A white printed through a 230-mesh screen on a black shirt will not be as bright as a white printed through a 110-mesh screen. The printer has to balance detail against opacity against hand feel, and that balance shifts with every job depending on the design, the ink, and the garment color.

86 mesh vs. 110 vs. 156 vs. 230 vs. 305: when each is used

An 86-mesh screen is used almost exclusively for specialty inks that need a heavy deposit: puff ink, high density, glitter, and shimmer effects. The large openings let thick formulations pass through without clogging. A 110-mesh is the workhorse for white underbases and bold single-color prints where opacity is the priority. It lays down a thick, bright layer of ink. A 156-mesh sits in the middle ground and is good for general spot color work where you want decent opacity without too much ink buildup.

A 200-mesh screen starts getting into the higher detail range. It's used for detailed spot color work and softer prints. A 230-mesh is the sweet spot for most production work that involves halftones, gradients, or designs with fine lines. It holds dot detail well and produces a noticeably softer print than a 110 or 156. A 305-mesh is used for extremely fine detail and process color work (CMYK printing), where you need to hold very small dots without gain. It deposits a very thin layer of ink, which can be a problem on dark garments where opacity matters.

Photo emulsion is a liquid chemical coating that hardens when exposed to ultraviolet light. The screen is coated with emulsion on both sides using a scoop coater, then dried in a dark room or drying cabinet. Once dry, the coated screen is placed in an exposure unit with the film positive sandwiched against the mesh. UV light hits the emulsion through the clear areas of the film and cross-links the polymer chains, making those areas permanent. Where the design on the film blocks the light, the emulsion stays soft.

After exposure, the screen goes to a washout booth. A gentle spray of water dissolves the unexposed emulsion and washes it out of the mesh, leaving open areas in the exact shape of the design. What remains is a durable stencil that can handle hundreds or thousands of impressions before it starts to break down. The quality of this stencil depends on the emulsion type, the coating thickness, the exposure time, the quality of the film positive, and the vacuum seal between the film and the screen during exposure. Underexpose the screen and the stencil will be weak and wash out during the print run. Overexpose it and fine details will fill in because the light crept under the edges of the film.

Film Positives and Output Quality

The film positive is a transparency that carries your design in opaque black ink on a clear background. The black areas block UV light during exposure, creating the open areas in your stencil. The density of the black on the film is critical. If the black isn't dense enough, UV light bleeds through it and partially exposes the emulsion underneath, which means your stencil won't wash out cleanly. Thin, grayish films produce screens with ragged edges and lost detail. A properly printed film has a solid, opaque black that blocks UV completely.

Film output can come from a dedicated film printer, an inkjet with specialty film and RIP software, or a laser printer on transparency media. The method matters less than the result. What matters is that the black is truly opaque, the registration marks are accurate if you're doing multi-color work, and the halftone dots are clean and well-defined if the design uses gradients. A $200 inkjet with the right RIP software can produce film that works perfectly for screen making. The printer's job is to verify the film quality before burning the screen, not after.

Screens aren't single-use. After a print run is finished, the screen goes through a reclamation process to strip the old stencil and prepare the mesh for a new design. The emulsion is dissolved using a chemical remover, then the screen is pressure-washed to clear all traces of the old stencil from the mesh. If any emulsion or ink residue remains in the mesh (called a ghost image or haze), it can affect the next stencil. Stubborn haze is removed with a separate dehazing chemical.

A well-maintained screen can be reclaimed and reused dozens of times before the mesh degrades. Over time, repeated stretching, chemical exposure, and squeegee abrasion weaken the polyester fibers and the mesh loses tension. When a screen drops below the required tension for consistent printing, the mesh gets stripped from the frame, and fresh mesh is stretched and glued onto the aluminum frame. The frames themselves last essentially forever. It's only the mesh that wears out. Keeping screens properly tensioned, cleaning them thoroughly after every use, and storing them correctly in a dark, dry environment extends their life significantly and ensures consistent results from job to job.

Plastisol is a PVC-based ink suspended in a plasticizer. It does not air dry, which is one of its biggest advantages on press. You can leave plastisol sitting in the screen for an hour and come back and start printing without the ink having dried in the mesh. It only cures when it reaches approximately 320°F, at which point the PVC particles fuse together and the ink bonds to the fabric. This means the printer has complete control over when the ink sets, and ink doesn't dry in the screen and ruin the stencil mid-run.

Plastisol produces vibrant, opaque colors that work on both light and dark garments. It holds detail well, it's available in an enormous range of colors including specialty formulations, and it can be mixed to match specific Pantone colors with precision. If you have a Pantone number, we can match it. If you don't, just send us what you've got and we'll get it dialed in. The durability is excellent. A properly cured plastisol print will last the life of the garment without significant cracking or fading if the garment is washed and dried normally.

The common criticism of plastisol is that it feels "heavy" or "plastic" on the shirt. That was true twenty years ago when printers were laying down thick deposits through low mesh counts. Modern plastisol printing with higher mesh screens (200 to 230 count), soft-hand additives, and curable reducers produces prints that are noticeably softer than what most people picture when they think of screen printing. We use these techniques on every job. The goal is a print that looks sharp and feels like it belongs on the shirt.

It's also worth noting that plastisol itself has evolved. Traditional plastisol is PVC-based, but the industry now offers non-PVC plastisol formulations that use alternative resins while printing and curing exactly like traditional plastisol. There are also soy-based plastisol inks that replace petroleum-derived components with soy oil. These alternatives print the same, cure the same, and don't dry in the screen, so a printer can switch to them without changing equipment or workflow. They cost more per gallon, but they exist and they work. The ink industry hasn't stood still on this.

How Pantone color matching works in screen printing

The Pantone Matching System is a standardized color language that lets a printer in Virginia and a designer in California talk about the exact same shade of blue without any guesswork. Each Pantone color has a specific formula: a combination of base inks mixed in precise ratios to produce a consistent, repeatable color. If you have a Pantone number for your brand colors, we can match it exactly. If you don't, that's fine too. Most of our customers send us a logo file or just describe the color they want and we match it by eye against our ink library. Pantone numbers make color matching faster and more precise, but they're not required.

In a screen printing shop, Pantone mixing works like paint mixing at a hardware store but with more precision. You start with a set of base colors and follow the published formula for the Pantone shade you need. Weigh each base on a gram scale, mix thoroughly, and the result should match the swatch in the Pantone book. The key word there is "should." Ink color can shift depending on the substrate. The same Pantone red printed on a white shirt, a gray shirt, and a black shirt over a white underbase will look like three different colors because the ink is interacting with different surfaces underneath. The underbase brightness, the fabric texture, and even the garment dye can all influence the final color. A good printer accounts for this and adjusts accordingly, but the customer should understand that a Pantone number is a target, not a guarantee of an exact match on every substrate.

We can print water-based if a customer requests it. We've done it. The print feels great on the right garment, especially on a white or light-colored cotton tee where the ink dyes into the fiber and you can barely tell there's a print there by touch. That soft hand feel is real, and it's the reason water-based ink has a loyal following.

What we push back on is the idea that water-based is the "eco-friendly" choice. It gets repeated everywhere, and when you actually look at the chemistry, it's not that clean of a story. Water-based inks use water as a carrier, but the binders that hold the pigment to the fabric are acrylic polymers. Acrylic is plastic. It's not PVC like plastisol, but it's still a synthetic polymer that stays on the garment after the water evaporates. Many formulations also contain co-solvents including formaldehyde and alcohol to improve flow and adhesion.

In the shop, the practical differences are significant. Water-based dries in the screen. If you stop printing to fix a problem, reload shirts, or deal with anything that takes more than a couple minutes, the ink starts drying in the mesh and the screen clogs. That means more screen cleaning mid-run, more wasted ink, and more downtime. Plastisol never dries in the screen because it only cures with heat. You can walk away from a plastisol screen for an hour and come back to it like nothing happened.

The curing side is where the energy argument falls apart. Plastisol needs to hit 320°F and it's done. Water-based needs to hit temperature and then stay there long enough for all the moisture to evaporate out of the ink film. That means slower belt speeds through the dryer, longer dwell times per garment, and more energy per piece. On a 200-piece run, that difference adds up. And the cleanup water from washing screens, squeegees, and flood bars carries pigments and acrylic residue down the drain. Some of those particles are finer than what municipal filtration catches.

None of this makes water-based ink bad. It makes a beautiful print on the right job. But the environmental advantage over modern plastisol, especially non-PVC and soy-based formulations, is a lot smaller than the marketing suggests. We use plastisol because it gives us the most control, the widest range of applications, and the most consistent results across the types of jobs we do every day.

Discharge ink works by chemically removing the dye from the fabric rather than laying ink on top of it. The most common activating agent is zinc formaldehyde sulfoxylate, often abbreviated ZFS. When the ink hits curing temperature, the ZFS breaks down the reactive dyes in the garment and bleaches the fabric back toward its natural (usually off-white) color. Pigments can be added to the discharge base to simultaneously remove the garment dye and replace it with a new color. The result is an incredibly soft print with zero hand feel because the color is in the fiber, not on it.

The tradeoff is formaldehyde. ZFS releases formaldehyde gas during curing, and formaldehyde is classified as a known human carcinogen by OSHA. Flashing discharge ink on press (which is common in multi-color jobs) puts formaldehyde directly into the air the printer is breathing. Many discharge formulations also contain alcohol-based co-solvents to improve flow and penetration. Proper ventilation and respiratory protection are mandatory, not optional. Residual formaldehyde can remain on the garment after printing, and in some cases, discharge-printed garments fail the thresholds set by the EU for children's apparel if they aren't washed before wearing.

Discharge also only works on 100% cotton garments dyed with reactive dyes. It won't discharge polyester, it won't discharge pigment-dyed fabrics, and the results vary from one dye lot to the next because the discharge reaction depends on the specific dyes used by the garment manufacturer. The printer can't control what dyes are in the fabric, so the outcome always has a degree of unpredictability. When it works well, discharge produces some of the best-looking prints in the industry. But the health hazards, the chemical handling requirements, and the inconsistency are why it's not a standard offering at most small shops.

Beyond the three main ink types, screen printing offers a whole range of specialty inks that produce unique tactile and visual effects. This is where screen printing really separates itself from digital methods. None of these effects can be replicated with DTG or DTF.

Puff ink contains a chemical foaming agent that expands at curing temperature, turning a flat print into something with physical height. The finished texture is soft and rounded. It works best on bold shapes and large type because fine detail gets lost when the ink expands. Thin lines and small text will bloat and blur together. Puff has been around since the '80s and it's made a serious comeback in streetwear.

High density printing builds ink up vertically to create a raised, rigid print with sharp edges. Where puff is soft and rounded, high density is flat on top with steep sidewalls. Think of the molded rubber badge on the chest of a performance shirt. Getting there takes multiple print-flash cycles with special thick-deposit screens, and the design has to be simple. We like high density for the right application. It makes a bold, tactile statement that you can feel with your fingers.

Suede ink cures to a velvety matte finish that feels like brushed fabric. Run your thumb across it and it feels soft, almost fuzzy. Shimmer inks contain fine reflective particles that catch light without being as aggressive as glitter. Glitter inks use larger reflective particles for a more obvious sparkle effect and require low mesh counts (usually 86) to let the particles pass through without clogging.

Foil printing uses an adhesive printed through the screen that bonds a metallic foil sheet to the garment during curing. The result is a mirror-finish metallic surface that no ink can replicate. Gold, silver, holographic, and colored foils are all available. Color-changing inks (sometimes called thermochromic) react to temperature. The print shifts color when touched by warm hands or exposed to heat, then returns to its original color as it cools. Glow-in-the-dark ink charges under light and emits a visible glow in darkness. Reflective ink bounces light back at the source, similar to road sign material.

Every one of these specialty inks requires its own mesh count, its own cure profile, and hands-on experience to print cleanly. Most of them can't be combined with each other in the same print without careful planning. But they're the reason screen printing can produce things that no other decoration method can touch.

Some shops charge the underbase as an additional color. So if you have a three-color design on a dark shirt, they quote it as four colors because the white underbase counts as a separate screen and a separate pass. We don't do that. If your design needs an underbase, we include it in the job. It's part of printing on dark garments and we price accordingly from the start rather than tacking on a surprise extra color after the fact.

When printers talk about a "coated" versus "uncoated" surface, they're referring to what the ink is printing on. On a white shirt with no underbase, the ink prints directly on cotton fibers. The cotton absorbs some of the ink and the fibers create a slightly textured surface underneath. On a dark shirt with a white underbase, the colors are printing on a cured layer of white plastisol rather than raw fiber. That cured ink surface is smoother and less absorbent than cotton, so the colors interact with it differently.

This coated versus uncoated difference is also part of why plastisol and water-based prints look different from each other. Plastisol forms a distinct film on the fabric surface. Each color layer is essentially printing on the coated surface of the layer below it. Water-based ink absorbs into the fibers and becomes part of the fabric itself, so it's always interacting with an uncoated surface. That's why water-based prints have a softer, more muted quality and plastisol prints tend to look more saturated and punchy.

The practical result is that the same color will look slightly different depending on what it's printing on. On a white shirt with no underbase, the color has a slightly organic quality. On a dark shirt over a white underbase, the color appears more vibrant. Neither is wrong. They're just different, and a digital mockup won't show this difference because mockups overlay a flat graphic on a flat photo. The interaction between ink, underbase, and fabric texture only exists in the physical print.

We print on a Vastex V-2000HD, a heavy-duty manual rotary press made in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. It's an all-steel machine: steel-tube legs, 3-inch square steel rotor arms, heavy-gauge steel rotor assemblies, and never-warp steel pallets with rubber tops. Every critical moving part rides on ball bearings. It's built to hold registration over thousands of impressions without drifting, and it does.

The V-2000HD is expandable from one color and one station up to ten colors and ten stations. The micro-registration system is completely tool-free, meaning every adjustment for alignment, off-contact, and screen leveling can be made by hand without wrenches. A quarter turn of the registration knob moves the print head precisely .015 inches. A half turn moves it .031 inches. A full turn moves it 1/16 of an inch. That level of mechanical precision is what allows tight multicolor registration on a manual press.

An automatic screen printing press is a mechanical system where the squeegee stroke, flood stroke, print speed, and pallet indexing are all controlled by motors and programming. The operator loads and unloads shirts, but the machine handles the actual printing. The advantages are speed and mechanical consistency. An automatic can print 500 to 1,000 pieces per hour depending on the number of colors and the complexity of the job. The squeegee pressure and speed are identical on every single impression.

A manual press is operated by hand. The printer pulls the squeegee across the screen for every single print. They control the pressure, the angle, the speed, and the contact with the garment through their hands. This is slower. Significantly slower. But it gives the printer something an automatic doesn't have: the ability to adjust on the fly.

Every garment that comes through the press is slightly different. A shirt with a thicker collar seam sits on the platen differently than one with a thinner seam. A heavyweight 6.1 oz blank behaves differently than a 4.2 oz fashion tee. The cotton from one dye lot absorbs ink slightly differently than the next. On an automatic, the press runs the same program regardless. On a manual press, the operator feels these differences through the squeegee handle and adjusts pressure and contact instinctively. That kind of real-time adaptation is invisible to most people, but it's the difference between a clean print and one where the ink didn't fully clear in the collar area or the print shifted because the garment moved under squeegee pressure.

Where Pinholes Go Unnoticed

Pinholes are tiny openings in the screen emulsion that let ink through where it shouldn't. They show up as small dots or specks on the printed garment, usually in the negative space around the design. On a manual press, the printer sees them almost immediately because they're looking at every single print as it comes off the screen. A quick dab of screen blockout on the mesh fixes it in seconds.

On an automatic running at production speed, a pinhole can open up mid-run and go undetected for dozens of pieces before someone at the catch position notices a speck. There's actually an add-on sensor called a No-Shirt Detector, sold by press manufacturers, that prevents the press from printing on an empty platen when the loader misses a load. The fact that this sensor needs to exist tells you something about the pace. Misloads happen often enough at production speed that press manufacturers engineered a solution for it. On a manual press, the operator is the sensor.

Setup Economics

Automatic presses are expensive. Entry-level models start around $34,000 and production-grade machines from manufacturers like M&R and ROQ run well into six figures. They need dedicated floor space, compressed air, and a crew of at least two people to operate. For a 500-piece order, the setup time gets absorbed across the run and the per-piece cost drops fast. The machine earns its keep on volume.

For a 100-piece order, which is closer to our typical job size, the setup time on an automatic is the same as a 500-piece order, but it gets spread across far fewer pieces. The economics flip. A manual press with a skilled operator can be set up, registered, and printing in less time than it takes to dial in an automatic for the same job, and the per-piece quality is at least as good if not better for short to medium runs. Our 24-piece minimum exists because screen printing has a fixed setup cost regardless of quantity, and below that threshold the math stops working for everyone.

How shops are automating every step of screen printing

The screen printing industry is moving toward automating every stage of the process, not just the press. It's worth understanding what that looks like because it affects what you're getting when you order from different types of shops.

Computer-to-screen (CTS) systems image the design directly onto the emulsion-coated screen using inkjet or laser technology, eliminating film positives entirely. The screen goes from digital file to exposed stencil without a human ever printing a film, taping it to the screen, or positioning it in an exposure unit. Some CTS machines expose the screen automatically after imaging, meaning one operator loads a blank coated frame and the machine delivers a finished, registered screen in under two minutes. Automatic screen coaters apply emulsion with consistent thickness every time, replacing a hand technique that traditionally takes months to learn. Automatic screen washout systems develop the stencil with controlled water pressure so fine detail doesn't get blown out by an overeager person with a pressure washer.

On the press side, modern automatic presses control squeegee pressure, speed, angle, and flood stroke through programmable settings. The operator loads shirts and the machine handles the printing. Some systems include automatic registration using camera systems that align the screens digitally, removing the manual alignment step almost entirely. Pre-registration systems mean that CTS-generated screens arrive at the press already aligned to each other, so setup that used to take 30 minutes takes a few minutes.

The result is that a shop running a fully automated workflow can go from digital file to finished print with fewer skilled hands involved at each step. An employee who has never pulled a squeegee can be trained to operate an automatic press in days rather than the months or years it takes to develop manual printing skill. That's not a criticism. It's the reality of where the industry is heading, and it's driven by a genuine shortage of experienced screen printers entering the trade. Automation solves a real labor problem.

The tradeoff is flexibility. An automated shop is built to move volume. The systems work best when jobs are standardized, quantities are high, and the workflow doesn't need to stop and change mid-run. A manual shop is built to handle whatever walks in the door. The printer can switch mesh counts between colors, adjust pressure on a garment-by-garment basis, catch a problem immediately and fix it without stopping a production line, and handle the odd jobs that don't fit neatly into a programmed workflow. Neither approach is inherently better. They're built for different types of work. The important thing as a customer is understanding what kind of shop is printing your order and what that means for the product you're getting.

Micro-registration refers to the very fine adjustments made to each print head to bring all colors into alignment. On our Vastex V-2000HD, micro-registration is controlled by three knobs on each print head: one for side-to-side movement, and two for front-to-back and rotation. Each knob moves the screen a precise, measurable distance. A quarter turn equals .015 inches. There's no slop, no play, no guesswork. You can predict exactly how far the screen will move before you turn the knob.

The process starts with registration marks on the film positives. These are small crosshair targets printed on every color separation in the same position. When the screens are loaded on the press, the printer aligns the registration marks from each screen to a common target point, usually using a registration system or by eye with a loupe. Once the marks line up, a test print confirms the alignment. If any color is off, the printer uses the micro-registration knobs to nudge it into position. On a well-maintained press with quality screens, a skilled printer can achieve registration accuracy within a few thousandths of an inch. That's the difference between a print that looks professional and one that looks like the colors are drifting.

The squeegee is a rubber blade mounted in an aluminum handle. It's the tool that forces ink through the screen and onto the garment. The pressure applied, the angle of the blade, and the speed of the stroke all affect the print. Too much pressure and the ink floods past the edges of the stencil, losing sharpness. Too little and the ink doesn't fully transfer, leaving voids and uneven coverage. Too steep an angle and the ink deposit is thin. Too shallow and the deposit is thick.

Squeegees come in different durometers (hardness ratings). A 70-durometer blade is softer and deposits more ink. An 80-durometer is harder and deposits less. Some printers use triple-durometer blades, typically 70/90/70, where the hard center provides structure and the softer edges provide flex. Every job is a different balance of ink type, mesh count, and detail level.

Off-contact is the gap between the bottom of the screen mesh and the top of the garment surface. The screen doesn't sit flat on the shirt during printing. There's a small gap, usually a few millimeters, between the mesh and the fabric. When the squeegee pushes down on the mesh, the mesh makes contact with the garment at the point of the squeegee stroke. Behind the squeegee, the mesh snaps back up to its original position, releasing the ink cleanly onto the fabric.

This snap-back is what produces clean, sharp edges. If the off-contact is too low and the mesh sits on the garment, the ink doesn't release cleanly and the print smears. Too high and the squeegee has to push harder, stretching the mesh and distorting the image.

An undercured print looks fine coming off the press. The colors are bright, the detail is sharp, and the garment looks exactly the way it's supposed to. The problem shows up in the wash. Undercured plastisol hasn't fully fused, so the bond between the ink and the fabric is weak. After one or two washes, the print starts to crack. After a few more, the ink begins to peel and flake off in sheets. The customer thinks it's a quality problem with the ink or the design. It's actually a curing problem that happened in the dryer.

Overcuring is also possible but less common. If the garment stays in the dryer too long or the temperature runs too hot, the ink can scorch and the fabric can be damaged. White and light-colored garments are especially vulnerable. Too much heat will leave yellow marks or discoloration on the fabric that won't come out. Once a white shirt turns yellow from the dryer, that garment is ruined. The window between undercured and overcured is fairly wide for plastisol, which is one of the reasons it's the preferred ink for production printing. But it still requires attention and verification on every run.

Plastisol curing is a single-variable process: temperature. Get the ink to 320°F throughout its thickness and it's cured. The moment it hits that temperature, the PVC particles fuse. Water-based curing is a two-variable process: temperature plus time. The water has to evaporate completely out of the ink film before the acrylic binders can fuse. This means the garment has to reach cure temperature and then stay there long enough for all the moisture to escape. Depending on the ink thickness and the humidity in the shop, this can take two minutes or more per garment.

In production terms, that translates directly to belt speed. A plastisol job can run through the dryer at a belt speed that allows each garment maybe 30 to 45 seconds of heat exposure. A water-based job on the same dryer needs two to three times as long per garment, which means a slower belt speed and fewer pieces per hour. Multiply that difference across a 200-piece run and the production time gap is significant.

Fibrillation is when tiny fabric fibers poke up through the ink layer, giving the print a fuzzy or speckled appearance. It's most common on dark garments where the white underbase isn't thick enough to fully cover the fiber tips, or on heather fabrics where the mixed fiber composition creates an uneven surface. Proper flashing of the underbase, correct mesh selection, and adequate ink deposit minimize fibrillation, but some garment styles are more prone to it than others.

Ink bleeding is when the ink spreads beyond the edges of the stencil, creating a fuzzy border instead of a clean line. It's caused by too much squeegee pressure, too much ink in the mesh, improper off-contact, or a garment that's too warm on the platen.

Dye migration is a related but different problem and one of the trickier ones to deal with. The dye in the garment fabric, especially polyester and poly-blend garments, can migrate into the ink layer during curing, changing the print color. A white print on a red polyester jersey can turn pink if the dryer temperature or dwell time activates the garment dye. The dye literally moves out of the fabric and up into the ink. This is why dye migration is something a printer has to watch for on every polyester or sublimation-dyed garment. Low-bleed inks and lower cure temperatures help, but some fabric and dye combinations are just going to fight you.

Registration drift happens when multicolor prints start aligned but gradually shift over the course of a run. On a manual press, this can be caused by the platen working loose, the screen clamps not holding firmly, or the operator's fatigue changing their squeegee stroke over hundreds of prints. On an automatic, it's typically a mechanical issue with the indexing system. Ghosting is a faint shadow of the design that appears on the garment outside the intended print area, usually caused by ink residue left on the screen from a previous job that wasn't fully reclaimed.

Sometimes a print error is as simple as ink on a hand. The printer touches wet ink and then handles a garment, leaving a smudge or fingerprint on the shirt. That garment is ruined. High heat from the flash unit or dryer can also leave yellow marks on white or light-colored garments if the temperature runs too hot or the dwell time is too long. Once the fabric yellows, it doesn't come back.

Not every defect is a printing problem. Sometimes the garment itself has issues that only become visible after printing. Needle holes from the garment construction can appear in the shoulder or side seam areas. Dye inconsistency between garments in the same order can make prints look different even when they're identical, because the background color shifted. Fabric flaws like slubs (thick spots in the yarn), thin spots, or contamination from foreign fibers woven into the cotton can all show up in the printed area.

Mislabeled sizes happen more often than you'd expect from garment manufacturers. A medium tag on a large shirt means the customer gets the wrong size even though the print is perfect. Before a job ships, the printer should be checking garment size and quality, not just print quality. A good quality control process catches these issues before they leave the shop.

The garment industry is the most visible application of screen printing, but it's actually a fraction of what the process is used for globally. Printed circuit boards use screen printing to deposit conductive silver and resistive carbon inks onto ceramic substrates. Solar panel manufacturers screen print the silver grid lines onto silicon wafers. Medical device manufacturers screen print membrane switches and control panels. Automotive instrument clusters, appliance control panels, and cockpit displays are all screen printed.

In the signage industry, screen printing is used for everything from vinyl decals to full-color point-of-purchase displays. Glass bottles for the beverage industry are screen printed with ceramic inks that fuse permanently to the glass surface during kiln firing. Athletic equipment manufacturers screen print logos onto helmets, bats, and protective gear. Even the humble bumper sticker is a screen printed product. The process puts ink on surfaces that no other printing method can handle with the same combination of durability, color density, and ink thickness.

If you own a vintage screen printed shirt from the '70s or '80s, you've felt the difference. Those prints are thick. The ink sits on top of the fabric like a layer of paint. You can run your fingers across the chest print and feel exactly where the design starts and the blank fabric ends. The edges are sharp, the colors are dense, and after decades of washing the print has cracked and faded into something that looks completely different from what it looked like new. That cracking and aging is part of what makes vintage screen prints so sought after now.

The reason those old prints feel so heavy is because the inks and techniques of that era prioritized opacity and durability above all else. Printers laid down thick deposits of plastisol through low mesh counts, sometimes 60 or 86 mesh, which pushed massive amounts of ink onto the fabric. There was no conversation about "soft hand" because nobody was thinking about how a print felt against your skin. They were thinking about whether the logo was bright enough to read from across a parking lot.

Modern screen printing has moved toward softer prints. Higher mesh counts like 200 and 230 deposit thinner layers of ink. Soft-hand additives and curable reducers thin the ink further without killing the opacity. The goal now is a print that looks vivid but doesn't feel like a sticker on your chest. You can still get that vintage heavy-ink look if you want it. But the default in a professional shop today is a print that's bright, durable, and soft enough that you forget it's there when you're wearing it.