Setting up artwork for DTF: the five things that actually matter

DTF prints exactly the file you send. There is no operator translating your artwork into screens on the way, which is why the file is the whole job. Five things decide whether it comes out sharp, and none of them take long to check.

1. Resolution, measured at print size

300 DPI at the size it will actually print. That is the whole rule, and the part people skip is “at print size”. A file can be 300 DPI and still be too small, because DPI on its own is a label — what matters is pixels divided by inches.

Print width	Pixels needed	Typical use
3 in	900 px	Sleeve, hat front, back-neck tag
4 in	1,200 px	Left chest
8 in	2,400 px	Youth full front
11 in	3,300 px	Adult full front
12 in	3,600 px	Adult back print

A 1,200-pixel logo pulled off a website prints beautifully at 4 inches and as a soft blur at 11. Enlarging it in Photoshop does not add detail, it adds pixels; upscaling tools can help a photograph and cannot rescue a hard-edged logo. If the original vector exists, go back and get it.

When you upload to us we read the pixel dimensions and tell you what width the file honestly supports.

2. Transparency, and the white box problem

Two rules, and everything else follows from them:

• White in the file prints as white ink.
• Transparent in the file prints as nothing, and the garment shows through.

So a JPG cannot work: the format has no transparency, and the white rectangle around your logo is part of the image. It will print. On a black shirt this is a very expensive discovery. Export a PNG.

Semi-transparent pixels are the subtler trap. Soft drop shadows, outer glows and feathered edges get a partial white underbase, which on a dark garment reads as a pale halo around the design. Either make those elements fully opaque with a hard edge, or design them out. Gradients between two opaque colours are completely fine and print beautifully — it is transparency that causes the halo, not blending.

3. Colour mode, and what a screen cannot promise

Work in sRGB. Not Adobe RGB, not ProPhoto, not CMYK — our print workflow converts from sRGB, and a file in a wider space gets converted anyway, just without your say in how.

Your monitor emits light; a shirt reflects it. Nothing matches perfectly and anyone promising otherwise is selling something. The colours that shift most are the ones that only exist as light: electric blue, neon green, hot magenta all come back a step calmer on fabric. Muted palettes, earth tones and skin tones survive well, which is the opposite of what most people expect.

If a specific brand colour has to be right, print it once at a small size, press it on the actual garment, and look at it in daylight. That test costs a couple of dollars and it is the only way to know.

4. Line weight and small text

Strokes hold reliably at 0.5 pt and above at final print size. Below that they will print, and then they will not survive pressing and washing, which is worse than not printing at all because you find out after the customer does.

Text reads at about 6 pt in a clean sans and 8 pt in a serif with fine hairlines. The hardest case in the whole medium is fine white detail on a dark garment, because the white underbase and the white ink have to align exactly. It works — our line art collection is built on it — but do not construct an entire design out of hairlines and expect it to survive a season.

If you scale a design down after designing it, scale the stroke weights too. A 1 pt stroke at 12 inches becomes a 0.33 pt stroke at 4.

5. Format, and do not mirror it

PNG with transparency is the default and covers almost everything. PDF, TIFF and SVG are also accepted. SVG is worth using when the art is genuinely vector, because it scales without any resolution question at all.

Send it the way it should read on the garment. Mirroring happens in our print software. If you mirror it too, it prints backwards. We catch most of these before printing, but “most” is doing real work in that sentence.

The two-minute check before you upload

1. Open the file on a black background. Any white you did not intend, any halo round the edges? Fix it now.
2. Check pixel width against the table above for the size you are ordering.
3. Zoom to 100% and look at the thinnest line in the design.
4. Confirm it reads forwards.
5. Export as PNG, sRGB, transparent background.

Every file that comes to us gets looked at before it prints, and if something will disappoint you we email before pressing rather than after. But the two minutes above save the round trip, and the round trip is a day.