Note: Most companies that sell sublimated equipment, inks, and printers have color profiling processes they recommend. You may find you have to adjust your colors or dial back on your black to keep the design from becoming too heavy looking and over-saturated. A good RIP for a sublimated printer should allow you to save recipes for different types of fabrics and coatings so you can have a streamlined process for a later production run. Once you have this reference, you can go back and adjust your RIP if you need to make some curves for that specific item. You can then do a sublimated profile and see what happens to the colors after they’ve been applied to the fabric. If you’re going to do a sublimated print on a garment, get a sample of the product or the fabric to test. Often a printer will not want to spend the time and money to do this because sublimation inks are not cheap, but creating a color profile can save enormous headaches if it’s done well and be used as a standard for a process baseline to compare against. The key is to spend some time and properly profile your process all the way through, prior to doing a production run. This is why sublimation prints are often intentionally brighter and created with richer colors as these will show less variation in subtle ways after the process is done. The slight tint to your white surface can show up in a subtle sublimation print and make your lighter colors shift slightly in accordance to their tendency. The white in a fabric will tend to be slightly blue or magenta or even green. The fact is, white is almost never a balanced white. A slight variation in the brightness of the fabric that will be sublimated can influence the final product, too. When color is absorbed through the fibers, there’s always a tendency for additional saturation and other color shifts to occur. Learning the Color Progression of Sublimationįor printers who may be first venturing into sublimation, it’s crucially important to understand how color is adjusted during the dying process. There are some garments that have a cotton base with a polyester coating or poly fibers woven into the cotton to give printers additional options, but the optimal surface to sublimate is one that will completely accept the process of dyeing from the ink as it turns into a gas.Īssuming you’re comfortable with the basics of the process, and you have a clear idea of what types of garments you can do, it’s beneficial to consider a few quick tips to make your prints as good as they can be: learning the color progression of sublimation, adjusting your design comps to fit the products, using the nature of sublimation in your designs, and understanding outsourcing vs printing in-house. This process is almost always done on a polyester garment because it’s the best fabric for absorbing the dye into the fibers. (In some cases, a sublimated print may require additional heat or steps to properly “set” the dye so it doesn’t come out in the wash). Once the heat press is finished, the paper is peeled off of the fabric or garment and the print is ready to wear.The aligned garment and print are then heat pressed at the right temperature and pressure to convert the solid ink on the coated paper into a gas that can penetrate the fabric fibers.Often the sleeves are done at the same time to save steps. As a result, a much larger heat press will be needed to create the fabric piece for the front and back of the shirt. If the garment is being decorated prior to being sewn, it’s likely a much larger image and print will be used.In the case of a garment, the shirt is either printed as pieces of fabric prior to being sewn together, or the print is applied to a finished T-shirt. Next, the paper with the sublimation print is aligned with the product area that is to be decorated.These inks are then trapped into the coating on the paper.The design is then printed as a mirror image onto a sublimation paper using an inkjet printer that has been loaded with sublimation inks.The artwork is adjusted and sized in the computer for printing.To create a sublimated product is a relatively simple process: Many sport teams have moved toward sublimated apparel for training gear and uniforms because the garment retains all of the dry-wicking properties that an undecorated garment would, plus it’s a lot more colorful. Because it takes a white fiber and dyes it through heat and pressure, there’s no residual ink on the surface to create a texture or to block airflow. The beautiful thing about this process is the lack of any “print feel” to the garment. WITH THE INJECTION of performance fabrics and garments being developed for many niche markets, the demand for innovative ways to decorate them has drastically increased.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |