Quality loss going from PSD to PNG for printing?

[starbird]

I have just finished saving several images that will be used on shirts. They are 300dpi and about 90 megs in PSD.

They will not apparently upload to either of the shirt sites who have a limit of 200 megs, which I am no where near.

It seems to be if I re-save them as pngs, the quality be affected. I have never saved an image as a png when it was for print. All the magazines over the last 30 years have wanted PSD.

Ideas?

Thank you,
bonnie

 

[fredfish]

These days a lot of printing firms want stuff in .PDF - have you tried that?

Cheers

John

 

[starbird]

I have not tried that. These images are for t-shirts and such. Their choice is PSD or PNG. If I re save to PNG I will lose the 300 dpi quality. Their tech help is women in Latvia. I'm a woman, I can say that. They do not know what they are talking about and do not get back to anyone as they say they will. I tried the other company and the same happens. No messages, just the button that says upload files and the file never gets added.

Does anything in life ever work the way it's supposed to?

 

[fredfish]

Does anything in life ever work the way it's supposed to?

Amen to that !!! I hope you get it sorted.

Cheers

John

 

[Trevor Dennis]

You can set the DPI of raster content when saving out to PDF, and vector content remains fully scalable. Use the High Quality Print preset and you are good to go — just leave all layers intact and don't mess it up with a copy > merged layer at the top of the stack turning it all into raster. I don't know much about printed t-shirts and what colour space is needed, but there are specialist web sites out there with what I assume is reasonable advice. What I really like about the link below, is that they tell you to leave the colour separation to them.

https://gomedia.com/zine/tutorials/pro-tips-preparing-artwork-t-shirt-printing/

 

[thebestcpu]

Hi Starbird

Without knowing the specific T-Shirt printing site you are using, it is hard to give real specific advice as many have different requirements. Here is my take without that detail.

Unless the t-shrit company is using extremely high thread count material e.g. > 200 threads per inch, then 300 dpi is plenty of resolution since the resolution of the t-shirt material itself is limited. Comparing to high end magazine print resolution requirements is totally different.

An RGB 8 bit per color image saved in PNG at 300 dpi can be up to 27.2 inches on each side and still fit in a 200 Meg file size. Even larger dimensions can be supported using the lossless compression option with PNG.

So there should be no quality issues to the first order save out to PNG format vs leaving in PSD

The only issue I see would be if the image or portions of your image are already in raster format (not vector/paths/text) and at a smaller pixel count that does not have the dpi needed for the size print you need. If that were the case, then it would not matter if it were in PNG or PSD...as you are already at too low a pixel count for the highest quality.

Other than this, I am assuming that the print company is using RGB input (since PNG does not support CMYK) and that you are delivering the image in the color space that the print company needs (most often sRGB).

Hope this helps and if you need more specifics, it would help to know the specific print company(s) you plan to use and more specifics about your image (e.g. is in vector/path format or raster, which color mode and color space)

Best regards

John Wheeler