HELP - A complete beginner requesting assistance

gcfarri

New Member
I put out a post before asking for help selecting a free program but as I did not get any concrete suggestions I will try again with different wording and hope for the best.

As a complete beginner and designing T-shirts and I would like to find out some of the better free T-shirt design software out there. Most of the free ones that I have looked at seem very complicated and I have found during my research on them that they are more for an advanced design which is not for me. What I would like is some kind of program that I can use with Amazons Merch program as I have been accepted as into their program.

Some of the programs that I like is Vectr & paint .net- I don’t know if there are others that are easy to use but maybe not as effective or advanced as one’s like gimp or ink space but will do the job for Merch’s designing T-shirts.

The main things I would like to do in my T-shirt designs are :

Edit text

3D text

import photos

Wrap text around an object

change the background color

as well as any other tasks that you can suggest.

As many of you know Amazons Merch program requires 15 x 18” - designs to be saved as .PNG – 300 dpi & a resolution of 5,400 x 4,500 and a transparent background. (If any of this is wrong please let me know). Most of Merch’s requirements I don’t really understand so if anyone out there could please explain them to me and how I might be able to utilize them with another simpler program I would really appreciate it.


Thank you Craig
 
The features you've listed should be doable in most of the programs you've mentioned. To be blunt, I think you're just going to need to spend some time to learn how to use one of these applications if you want to create t-shirt graphics. I don't personally know of anything that is specifically designed for t-shirts, and if there is such an app, I suspect it will be severely limited or will just produce generic designs.

I highly recommend giving Affinity Designer a go. It's not free, but there's a trial, and it's a great piece of software that's powerful but not overwhelming in terms of options. It's pretty intuitive and easy to het your head around.

To answer your question about artwork specs, you would create a new file in whatever software you eventually use that is 15 inches by 18 inches or 5,400 pixels by 4,500 pixel, and set the resolution to 300dpi. At 300dpi the dimensions of the file in pixels and inches are the same. I personally prefer to use a real-world measurement like inches or millimetres so I can easily check a size using a ruler if I need to.

300dpi is the standard resolution for printing most things you will look at up close (magazine, photos, t-shirts), and ensures that what you're designing on screen will be the correct size when printed in real life. If you use a lower dpi, the image will either be printed too small, or will be scaled up and will look pixelated or blurry.

When you export the file to print, you just save it as a PNG with a transparent background. That basically means don't any any form of solid background such as a white fill, and most software should export it without a background automatically.
 
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