What size image do I need?

The one rule

Printed width in inches, multiplied by 150. That is your minimum pixel width.

A logo printed 12 inches across a t-shirt needs about 1800 pixels. A 4 inch cap logo needs about 600. That is the whole calculation.

Multiply by 300 instead if you want the ideal rather than the minimum. The gap between the two is real but small, and 150 is what most printing actually uses.

Why 150, when everyone says 300

Both numbers are right, for different things.

Printing onto fabric works at 150. The ink spreads slightly into the weave, so detail beyond 150 has nowhere to land. Most print partners build their templates at exactly this.

Embroidery and paper work at 300. Thread and paper hold much finer detail, so these ask for double.

Assuming 300 everywhere is the common mistake. It makes perfectly good artwork look like it has failed, and sends people hunting for resolution they never needed.

What common uses actually need

Caps use 300 because they are embroidered. The garments use 150.

Always check your printer's own template. These are typical, not universal: print areas differ between a standard tee and a cropped one, and between suppliers. The numbers your print partner shows you beat this table every time.

Getting there from the app

Generate it big in the first place. This is by far the best option. Several of our image models output up to 4096 pixels natively, which covers every garment size above with room to spare. Generating a logo on its own - rather than cutting it out of a larger scene - gives you real detail at full size.

Upscale what you already have. Under Image Editing, Upscale multiplies your image 4x for a flat 4 credits. It genuinely reconstructs edges rather than simply stretching, so a 500 pixel logo becomes a usable 2000 pixel one. That single step takes artwork that was too small for any garment and makes it big enough for almost all of them.

Do not resize it in another program. Stretching an image to a bigger number adds pixels without adding any detail. The file gets heavier, the reported resolution goes up, and the print looks exactly as soft as before. This is the single most common way people think they have solved the problem and have not.

A trap worth knowing

Resolution is not a property of the file. It is the file against the size you print it.

The same 500 pixel logo is 125 DPI across a 4 inch cap and 25 DPI across a 20 inch poster. Nothing about the file changed.

Which means printing something smaller is a real fix. If your uploader warns that quality is low, reducing the placement from 5 inches to 4 raises the effective resolution by a quarter, costs nothing, and often looks better proportioned anyway.

Backgrounds

For anything printed on a garment, you usually want a transparent background, so the fabric shows through instead of a white or black rectangle around your design. Use Remove Background in Image Editing, then check the result over both a light and a dark colour before sending it.

Check it, do not assume it. Background removal struggles when your design and its background are similar in tone - a dark logo on a dark backdrop can come back with the insides of the letters removed along with the background. It is obvious the moment you look at it over white, and invisible until you do.

If it still is not big enough

A poster is the usual case, because 16 inches and up needs 5000 pixels or more.

• Regenerate rather than upscale. Ask for the artwork again at full size instead of enlarging a small version.
• Print it smaller. A3 asks a great deal less than a 20 x 30.
• Rebuild it as vector if it is a logo. Type and simple shapes can be redrawn as vector artwork, which scales to any size at all. That is a design job rather than something the app does, but it solves the problem permanently.

Related

• Brand Studio
• Getting started with Image Studio