Why I built Tonera

Hi, I’m Andreas. I love making shirts: for myself, for friends, and now and then for someone who saw one and asked where it came from. Tonera started because almost every design I made needed the same couple of fixes before it could be printed, and I got tired of paying a monthly fee just to make them.

Getting artwork ready for DTF printing mostly comes down to two things. You knock out the background color so the print doesn’t come with a box around it, and you turn soft shading into a halftone the printer can actually reproduce. Neither is hard once you know how.

The trouble is that the tools everyone points you to live inside suites like Adobe Creative Cloud, and those keep getting more expensive. If you design for a living, the subscription pays for itself. If you print a dozen shirts a month, or you’re just starting out and don’t know yet whether this hobby is going to stick, it’s a lot of money every month for two buttons.

Something that opens in a browser, does those two jobs well and then gets out of the way. Nothing to install, and no uploading your artwork to someone else’s server. Everything in Tonera runs on your own computer.

It isn’t trying to be Photoshop. Photoshop does a thousand things. Tonera does a handful, and the aim is for it to do them well enough that you don’t have to open anything else for this part of the job.

People with a heat press in the garage. Friends making matching shirts for a trip. Someone starting a small print shop on a tight budget. And anyone who has clicked on a tutorial, heard “first, open Photoshop” in the first ten seconds, and thought: I don’t have Photoshop.

The whole workflow is free. You’ll see one ad per session before you export, and that’s it. If the ad bugs you, or you just want to help keep the lights on, Pro removes it. I’d like to keep the deal that simple.

If something breaks, if a feature is missing, or if you made something with it you’re proud of, I’d honestly like to hear about it. Email our contact form or use the contact form.