Custom photo t-shirts made from your photos
To print photos onto a fabric, your photo needs to meet certain minimum requirements to assure a pleasing result.
If the photos are digital, they need to be of high enough quality to get the size print you need (say 10″x10″ at 300 dpi.) If you take photos specifically to make a shirt, set your camera for the highest resolution. We shoot for 300 dots per inch (dpi) resolution. If you have a photo CD or the original file from a digital camera or if the file is substantially greater than 100kb, it is probably fine. (The file size of photos from my camera averages 2.5 megabytes per shot.)
Photos that you copy off a website are usually not acceptable quality for printing purposes. It may look fine on your computer screen but may look blurry when enlarged and printed. Similarly, photos taken with a cell phone camera probably won’t make the cut either if you’re looking to enlarge much.
If the file size of a photo on your computer is less than 100kb, there will probably be issues. They will most likely print blurry. (The file size is how many kilobytes or megabytes the photo consists of.) Most photos copied off a website fall well under 100kb.
Jolene describes it this way: “When you try printing a photo copied from a website, the results are fuzzy. Then when you try and print that on fabric, the results are fuzzier.” The reason for that is that fabric is porous, so by its nature printing on it loses a little crispness as opposed to printing the same file on something like glossy photo paper.
For best results, we strive to get the best photo original. We can scan a hard copy print of a photo to get an acceptable image to transfer to a shirt. We may also be able to convert the photographic image into something artistic. We charge an extra art fee for this kind of work.
We will be happy to evaluate a photo or graphic for you. Please email it to us at CreativtyOn@comcast.net.
Find out how to submit artwork to Creativity On. Visit our Downloads page to get the latest submission guide.
