Exporting from Procreate and Photoshop for UV & DTF printing

The four rules, regardless of app

1. PNG with transparency. JPG has no alpha channel, so the whole canvas prints. TIFF works in some RIPs but PNG is universal.
2. Final size at 300 pixels per inch. That's the baseline for both UV and DTF. Build the canvas at that size before drawing; enlarging later blurs edges and widens the halo.
3. No background layer. Hidden or deleted. If anything opaque sits behind the artwork, the printer prints a rectangle.
4. A hard edge. Every pixel either fully opaque or fully transparent. Neither app does this for you by default; it's the step at the end.

Procreate

Canvas setup

Create the canvas with Custom size, switch the units to inches or millimetres, enter the print size, and set DPI to 300. If the canvas already exists, open the wrench menu → Canvas → Crop & Resize → Settings and check the DPI there. Procreate caps the layer count on very large canvases; a 12 × 12 in canvas at 300 DPI (3600 × 3600 px) is well within range on any recent iPad.

While you paint

• Procreate brushes are anti-aliased. Every stroke has a 1–3 pixel soft edge, which is fine; that's the fringe the cleanup step removes. But airbrush and other soft-edged brushes produce a 20–50 pixel gradient of partial transparency. Keep those inside the solid body of the artwork, never on the silhouette.
• Avoid Gaussian blur on the whole layer. Blur spreads transparency outward from every edge. Blur details on a separate layer that sits fully inside the opaque area, or skip it.
• Watch layer opacity. A layer at 70% opacity is 100% ghost pixels when flattened. Keep layers at 100% and change the colour instead.
• Check the silhouette at 200–400% zoom. Stray dots from a textured brush or a smudge on the outside of the drawing will print as white specks on a dark substrate.

Export

1. In the Layers panel, uncheck the Background colour layer at the bottom. This is the number one reason Procreate exports come out with a solid white background. The canvas should show a checkerboard.
2. Wrench → Share → PNG. Procreate's PNG export keeps transparency. (Share → JPEG drops it; Share → PSD keeps layers if you plan to finish in Photoshop.)
3. AirDrop, Files or email the PNG to the machine that runs your RIP.

Photoshop

Document setup

File → New, set width and height in inches or millimetres at 300 pixels/inch, colour mode RGB 8-bit, background contents Transparent. If you're starting from a photo, check Image → Image Size with Resample unticked: the resolution field should read 300 at the print dimensions. If it reads 72, you don't have enough pixels for that print size and enlarging will soften every edge.

Cutting out the subject

Whatever tool you use, the result is a layer with partially transparent edges:

• Select Subject / Remove Background produce a soft mask; ticking Decontaminate Colors in Select and Mask fixes the tint of the edge pixels, which is useful, but keeps them semi-transparent.
• Magic Wand with Anti-alias on leaves a one-pixel soft ring. With Anti-alias off the edge is hard but jagged; the cleanup step gives you the hard edge without the jaggies, so leave anti-alias on.
• Layer → Matting → Defringe / Remove White Matte / Remove Black Matte recolour edge pixels. They do not change transparency. Good for the tint, irrelevant for the halo.

The Threshold trick (hardening the edge in Photoshop)

If you want to binarize the alpha channel inside Photoshop:

1. Make sure the cutout is a layer with a layer mask. If it isn't, Ctrl/Cmd-click the layer thumbnail to load its transparency as a selection, then click Add layer mask.
2. Click the mask thumbnail so the mask is the active target.
3. Image → Adjustments → Threshold. Set the level to 128. The mask becomes pure black and white: every pixel is now either in or out.
4. Optionally Select → Modify → Contract by 1 px on the mask if the edge still carries background colour, then Layer → Layer Mask → Apply.

This hardens the edge, but it doesn't fix the colour of the pixels that were promoted to opaque (they still carry a blend with the old background), and it doesn't give you a white plate. It's a fine manual route for one file; for a job sheet it's slow.

Export

1. Delete or hide the Background layer (the locked one at the bottom).
2. File → Export → Export As, format PNG, tick Transparency, leave Convert to sRGB on. This writes a PNG-24 with a full 8-bit alpha channel.
3. Avoid the legacy Save for Web PNG-8 preset: it reduces the image to 256 colours and blends the edge with a matte colour that prints as a fringe.

Then clean it (both apps)

Whether the PNG came from Procreate or Photoshop, the last step is the same:

1. Open pixelcleaner.net and drop the PNG in. Nothing is uploaded; the processing runs in the browser.
2. Every semi-transparent pixel lights up in green. On a Procreate drawing you'll see a thin ring along every stroke; on a Photoshop cutout, the soft mask edge.
3. Adjust the threshold slider if a soft area (hair, fur, smoke) is being cut too hard or too soft, and set the choke for your printer's registration.
4. Export the ZIP: a clean colour plate, a white plate that sits strictly inside the colour, a preview on your substrate colour, and a report of how many pixels were removed.

Load the two plates into the RIP as colour and white, and set the RIP's white choke to 0. This guide explains why one choke is enough.

Frequently asked questions