Raster Artwork

Every raster file is a fixed grid of colored squares called pixels, containing only as much visual information as it was exported with — a 1200 x 1200 pixel logo has exactly that many pixels and not one more. Stretch it to 3600 x 3600 and the software has to invent the missing detail through interpolation, softening edges and eventually breaking single-color logos into visible squares. JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, and layered PSD files are all raster; so is every phone photo and every screenshot pulled off a website.

For a buyer, this turns into a support ticket almost every week: someone emails over a logo saved from their own homepage — 300 x 300 pixels, 72 DPI, built for a browser — wanting it 11 inches across a hoodie chest. At screen size it looks crisp, since monitors only need 72 to 100 pixels per inch; blown up to the 300 DPI a screen-print or DTG file wants, that same raster artwork turns to mush. Customers argue the file "looked fine" right up until the proof came back soft around every letter.

The fix depends on what's in the image. Photographs are supposed to stay raster — that's what halftone screening and DTG are built to reproduce — so the move is sourcing the largest original available rather than a compressed web copy. Logos and single-color marks are worth converting to vector through redraw or vectorization instead, since a vector file has no native size limit at all.

The recurring misconception is that resolution is a fixed property of a file rather than a relationship between pixel count and output size. A logo that's 300 DPI at 2 inches wide is only 75 DPI stretched to 8 inches — the pixels didn't change, the inches did.