Tenzen Studio

Print effects and 3D mockups for garment artwork.

Halftone a photo into a real CMYK dot screen. Chew a logo up with ink erosion and grunge. Bend artwork onto a garment. Export SVG your printer can actually use, then put it on a 3D garment and save a GLB for your store.

Download for Mac

Free · Apple Silicon · macOS 11 or later · source on GitHub

Tenzen Studio with a photo screened into a four colour halftone

What it does

Three effects, independent of each other, none of them applied until you switch one on.

A photograph screened into cyan, magenta, yellow and black dots
Four colour halftone Real screen angles, real dot gain
The same photograph screened into a single black ink
One colour halftone For a single screen on a tee
The same photograph eroded into distressed one colour ink
Ink erosion and grunge Six styles, five sliders
Artwork bent into perspective by four corner handles
Warp Four corner handles, 18 presets
The 3D Mockup tab with a design on a polo sweatshirt

3D Mockup. Pick a garment, choose its colour and fabric, put designs anywhere on it, from the chest to the hood or the brim, see it in the store's own viewer and lighting before you save, and save one Draco-compressed GLB under Shopify's 15MB limit.

Everything comes out as vector. One compound path per ink inside a multiply group, so Illustrator opens four objects and not a hundred thousand. Plates writes each ink as its own named group, unblended, which is what a printer asks for.

Installing it

You do not need to know anything about code. It takes about a minute, and step three only happens once.

  1. Download it

    Tenzen Studio for Mac. It is about 150MB, so give it a moment.

  2. Install it

    Open the file you downloaded, then drag the app icon onto the Applications folder shown next to it. That is the whole install.

  3. Open it the first time

    The app is not signed by Apple, because that costs $99 a year and this is free. So macOS asks once:

    • Open Applications and double-click Tenzen Studio
    • macOS says it cannot verify the developer. Click Done
    • Open System Settings, then Privacy & Security
    • Scroll down to the line about Tenzen Studio, click Open Anyway
    • Confirm with your password or Touch ID

    That is it, forever. Every launch after that is a normal double-click.

Says the app is damaged? The download was interrupted. Delete it and download again. Anything else, say what happened here and it will get fixed.

It updates itself

Every time you open it, the app asks GitHub whether there is anything newer. If there is, it fetches it in the background and puts a small note in the corner of the canvas. Nothing interrupts you, and nothing changes until you say so.

A strip in the corner of the canvas reading: Version 2.2.0 is ready. Restart now. Later.
Update size
About a megabyte
When it applies
When you restart
If one breaks
Rolls itself back
What is sent
Nothing
An update that fails to start is noticed on the next launch, thrown away, and the app goes back to the version that worked. You can also force that yourself from Help, then Use the Built-in Version.

On an Intel Mac, or want to change something

The whole thing is open source under MIT. Run it from source, or build your own copy.

git clone https://github.com/aditya31Sharma/apparel-designer.git
cd apparel-designer
npm install
npm start

The README goes through how the halftone screen, the background removal and the rendering actually work.