Pipelines
Halftone: screen-print style designs for black shirts
Turns a design on a black background into a transparent halftone (dots or lines) for screen printing — great for shadows, fire and glow that a normal background remover can't keep. Free.
Halftone turns a design into a transparent halftone — the dot pattern from the old screen-printing days that still sells well today. It's a form of background removal made for black shirts.
When to use it
- Your design is on a black background and has shadows, smoke, fire, glow or semi-transparent parts that would look bad after a remove a solid background color.
- You want a vintage screen-print look.
Right now Halftone is designed for black backgrounds (other colors are planned). Preview on a black canvas background to see how it will print on a black shirt, and on white to see the dots themselves.
How to use it
- Add Halftone to your pipeline.
- Leave Mode on Auto — it works well for most images.
- Switch the canvas preview to black to check the result.
- Want more control? Switch Mode to Custom (see below).
It works across your whole batch, like every ReadyPixl tool.
Custom settings
Custom is all about preference — there's no right or wrong.
| Setting | What it does | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Crop Background | Trims the background around the edges. | On |
| Crop Threshold (0–255) | How dark counts as background when cropping. | 25 |
| Black Point / White Point (0–255) | Which tones become no-dots and full dots. | 16 / 100 |
| Gamma (0.1–3) | Brightens or darkens the midtones. Higher can add a lot of color and brightness. | 1 |
| Invert for Dark Garment | Inverts the tones for dark shirts. | Off |
| Method | Halftone (dots or lines) or Diffusion (scattered dither). | Halftone |
| Screen Frequency (LPI) (5–100) | How many lines per inch — bigger number = smaller, finer dots. | 35 |
| Screen Angle (0–90°) | The direction of the dot / line rows. | 23.5° |
| Dot Shape | Round dots or Line shapes. | Round |
| Screen DPI (72–1200) | The print resolution the pattern is built for. | 300 |
Tips
- Pair it with Image Adjustment — Colorize gives halftones a nice single-color look.
- Try both: run one batch with normal background removal and another with Halftone, and keep whichever looks better. Save each as a preset.
What to read next
- [Image Adjustment](image-adjustment) — brightness, contrast and Colorize
- [Color Removal V2](color-removal) — normal background removal
- [Saving and loading presets](../getting-started/presets)