Screen printing is a printing method that USES a scraper to drive ink through a template, but you may know this.Screen printing business can be felt to have its own language for all other terms.

Bitmap – an image created on a visual display unit where each pixel corresponds to one or more bits in memory, and the number of bits per pixel determines the number of colors available.Bitmap graphics are often referred to as raster graphics.

Bleeding – when the ink migrates out of the area it means to occur here which can be printed with 2 different colors closely as well as occurring.

Blend – print two or more inks at the same time to create a gradient effect.

Butt alignment – when the edges of two different print colors are side by side but do not overlap.

Burn screen – expose the prepared screen to very bright light to harden the emulsion.As soon as light hits the emulsion, the emulsion itself hardens.Wherever the film blocks the light, the emulsion remains soft and is washed off the screen.What’s left on the screen is the template.

Color separation – when you send a panchromatic image to a screen printer, the color separator will figure out how to decompose the image for printing.This is done using bitmaps and halftones.

Coverage – the quality or quantity of ink deposited on the shirt as it is printed through the screen.Also known as opacity.

CMYK – cyan, magenta, yellow and key or black.When combined with these four colors, you can make almost any color.This video discusses the differences between CMYK, RGB and color matching used in screen printing:

DPI – stands for “dots per inch.”This is a measure of the print resolution, which indicates the number of individual points that the printer can generate in one inch of linear space

Dye migration – occurs when printing on polyester shirts.On these shirts, the dye sits on top of the fiber in small beads of steam.As you print, the ink passes over the dye, and as your shirt passes through the dryer, the vapor beads turn into gas and fuse into the ink.This can change the color of the ink according to the color of the shirt on which the ink is printed.Example: white ink printed on a red shirt may have a pink tint.

Flicker – the process of printing the same ink color twice on a garment.It is most often used when printing lighter inks on darker materials.

Floodlight – the act of spreading ink across the screen and then pushing it in.

Gap alignment – the alignment of a work of art in which there is a gap between one color and another.

Halftone – halftone is the process of creating an image by using points of different sizes or spacing.The dots are so small that they fuse together to create colored shadows.

Ink sink – the side of the screen on which ink is placed.

Cull – omission of artwork in design to prevent overprinting of other colors.See tooling.

LPI (lines per inch) – measures print resolution.A line consists of halftones, which are created by the physical ink dots during the printing process to produce different tones.LPI is a measure of the tightness of lines in a halftone grid.

Wire mesh – this is the material stretched on the wire mesh frame itself.Different screens have different mesh Numbers.The lower the number, the more ink is allowed.

Mesh number – this is the number of openings in the mesh between the filaments.Larger Numbers have smaller openings, and smaller Numbers have larger openings.Using a higher mesh number will have a softer feel.

Overprint – printing a color on top of another color.

PMS colors – PMS stands for Pantone Matching System.This is the way to make the colors developed by Pantone match consistently.The general standard of screen printing is Solid Coated book.

Registration – the alignment of one color with another in the artwork.Multicolor printing requires different colors of artwork to align correctly.

Loss – a print that looks beyond the boundaries of a shirt or other printed garment.These prints work better on some garments than others (we recommend that your streamlined designs do not cover any thick seams or pockets, as this can interrupt the continuous look of such prints).

Spot color – spot color is any color produced by a single print of ink.

Colour separation/Seps – after the artwork is created, each colour must be printed on a transparent film called colour separation.These will be used to burn images of each color to the screen.