AI image tools are genuinely good at this now. People bring us AI artwork every week and most of it presses beautifully. The ones that do not almost always fail for the same handful of reasons, and every one of them is avoidable if you know about it before you generate.
Here is what we have learned from printing this stuff, and the prompt we would use ourselves.
The one problem a prompt cannot fix
Read this part even if you skip the rest.
AI image tools generate at a fixed size. Asking for "the highest resolution possible" does not make the tool exceed what it was built to output. ChatGPT tops out around 1024 by 1792 pixels. Midjourney gets you to roughly 2048 after an upscale.
Printing needs 300 pixels per inch. So:
- 1024 pixels wide prints cleanly at about 3.4 inches. That is a left-chest logo, not a full front.
- 2048 pixels prints at about 6.8 inches.
- A full front design at 11 inches wide needs about 3300 pixels.
Nothing in the prompt changes that. If you want a big design, generate your art and then run it through an upscaler before sending it over. Most AI tools have one built in, and there are free ones online. Upscaling to 4x is normal and works well on clean graphic artwork.
If you are not sure whether what you have is big enough, just send it to us and ask. We will tell you the largest size it will print cleanly at, and it takes us about a minute. That is a much better outcome than finding out after it is on thirty shirts.
Do not let the AI write your text
This is the single most common thing we fix.
AI image tools are still bad at lettering. They produce text that looks right at a glance and is wrong when you read it. We see it constantly: missing letters, doubled words, letters that are almost the right shape.
Generate the artwork without any text, then add the text yourself in our design editor. It takes a few seconds, the letters come out perfectly sharp because they are real type rather than a picture of type, and you can pick the exact wording and spelling you want.
If you do want the AI to include text, read every single character before you send it. Out loud. It is not enough to glance at it.
Two things that quietly ruin a transfer
Soft or glowing edges. DTF printing lays down a layer of white ink underneath your artwork so the colors stay bright on a dark shirt. That white layer follows the shape of your design. If the edges of your art fade out softly, or the AI added a glow or a drop shadow, the white underneath prints as a visible pale halo around your design. Ask for hard, clean edges and no shadows.
Text cut out of a shape. If the AI draws a badge with the letters knocked out, those letters are holes. Nothing prints there, so on a white shirt they come out white and on a black shirt they come out black. Sometimes that is exactly what you want. Usually it is a surprise. If your letters are cutouts rather than solid ink, tell us and we will confirm what it will look like on your garment color.
The prompt
Paste this into ChatGPT, Midjourney, or whatever you use. Replace the two bracketed parts.
Create the following artwork: [DESCRIBE YOUR DESIGN HERE] This artwork will be printed on a t-shirt using DTF heat transfer. Follow these requirements exactly. RESOLUTION Generate at the largest image size and highest quality available to you. Use a portrait or square canvas. COMPOSITION Create ONE standalone graphic. Center it with generous empty space on all four sides. Do not crop the design or let any part of it touch the edge of the image. BACKGROUND Place the design on ONE flat, solid color background. Use bright magenta or bright green, and do not use that color anywhere inside the design itself. The background must be perfectly uniform: no texture, no gradient, no lighting, no shadow, no noise, no pattern, no scenery. It will be deleted after generation, so it only needs to contrast. EDGES Keep every outside edge of the artwork crisp and hard. Do NOT add drop shadows, outer glows, halos, soft fades, or any effect that blends the artwork into the background. Do not simulate transparency with a checkerboard pattern. NO MOCKUPS Do not show the design on a shirt, hoodie, hat, mug, person, wall, poster, or any other object. Output the flat artwork only. COLOR Use solid, saturated colors. Avoid neon and fluorescent colors, which cannot be reproduced in print. TEXT Do not include any text, letters, words, or numbers in this design unless I have specifically asked for them above. Output the finished artwork now at the highest quality available.
When you are happy with it
- 1Remove the background. remove.bg does this free in one click, and it is what that solid magenta background was for. Save the result as a PNG so the transparency is preserved. If you skip this, do not worry, just tell us and we will handle it.
- 2Check the size. Right-click the file and look at the dimensions. Divide the pixel width by 300 to see how many inches it will print cleanly.
- 3Upload it. Send it through our order page, or email it over and we will look at it before anything gets printed.
We check every file that comes in. If something is going to cause a problem on press, you will hear from us before we print it, not after.
Bring it in and we will look at it
If you are local, come by with it on your phone. It is genuinely faster to sort out artwork standing at the counter than over email, and we would rather spend five minutes getting it right than reprint a batch.