What is digital direct-to-fabric printing?

When you venture into the magical world of personalized T-shirts, you are pervaded by a galaxy of terms, printing methods and costs.

In recent years, great strides have been made in the printing of clothing and gadgets.

One of the major innovations is direct digital printing on fabric: As we provide direct to garments printing in Dallas, let’s find out in detail what it is, how it works and its advantages.

Digital in the world of printing

Before its advent, typography relied entirely on  offset printing, a printing technique used for printing everything on paper but which requires high initial costs for the preparation of the plates: one for each primary color that will form the image.

The costs for the systems  therefore oblige orders with large quantities in order to spread the price as much as possible.

Among the many advantages introduced by digital, first of all we find the possibility of orders with short runs: having no initial costs due to printing systems, it allows you to create products without minimum order or even a single article.

Digital in Textiles

Until a few years ago, printing elements rich in detail, shades or photos on t-shirts seemed like a chimera and  screen printing was only able  to partially fill these limits; but, similarly to offset printing, it is an expensive technique for small quantities and made it practically impossible to customize a single shirt, especially if the graphics had multiple colors.

To make a single shirt, this problem could be solved  with heat-sealable material , which is nothing more than a vinyl of a chosen color that is cut out following the design and applied to the shirt.

The cons are clear: flat colors, not too fine details and a “plasticky” hand to the touch.

Some of these defects are stemmed by transfers: real sheets that can be printed from a PC and then applied to the shirt. Even in this case, however, we are always talking about an application, a tangible and evident layer to the touch – despite the considerable progress that transfers are making in terms of yield and quality. We want to let our t-shirt breathe with a beautiful imperceptible, vivid print, without limits of detail or color. Here comes the direct digital printing on fabric to our aid, for friends: DTG.

In short, we don’t really like covering the fabric of our beautiful shirts with plastic, do you?

We want to let our t-shirt breathe with a  beautiful imperceptible, vivid print , without limits of details or colors. And here comes the direct digital printing on fabric to our aid, for friends:  DTG .

DTG who?

Direct To Garment , direct to fabric. As easy to guess from the name, it is a technique that allows you to print directly on the fabric by coloring its fibers, thus allowing a soft, imperceptible to the touch and long-lasting print.

How does digital printing work?

To make this magic come true, there are machines that are very similar to a common four-color printer, that is, they mix 4 colors – cyan, magenta, yellow and black – to reproduce graphics, drawings and photos.

However, instead of trivial white sheets in these special printers we can put our t-shirts (and not only) “dressing them” on special tables that carry the garment under the heads from which the color is sprayed.

Goodbye to the limitations  we were talking about before: nuances,  images rich in details  and photos can finally be brought onto fabric.

To infinity and beyond

The addition of white ink also allows us to personalize colored and dark garments without any problem – to the delight of metal bands – exponentially expanding the customization capabilities.

The inks used dye the fabric but are relatively opaque as they are water-based and transparent. Therefore, by printing on colored garments, the graphics would change to the color of the shirt and – unless it is a desired effect – it would make us turn up our noses.

On black t-shirts, then, the design would be practically invisible. This is why white comes in handy:

• First of all, the  fabric  must be  treated with a special solution  (called Primer) which allows the white ink to adhere perfectly to the fibers and guarantee resistance and durability. This phase is very important and critical: the more the Primer is applied evenly, the better the final result will be;
• Once the t-shirt has been treated with the Primer, the machine will initially print a layer of white ink corresponding to our graphics, thus preparing a  clear base for the design  which in this way will not see its original colors altered.

White is a denser color than the others (it must have a greater quantity of pigments in order to be opaque), to the touch the print on a dark or colored garment could be less light than a print on a light t-shirt, remaining in any case very soft and resistant.

 

In summary, why choose direct digital printing on fabric?

Here, then, are the main characteristics and advantages of direct digital printing:

• No minimum order  having no printing systems and relative initial costs to be amortized, with the possibility of personalizing even just one article;
• No limit to colors, shades or details;
• Very soft, imperceptible to the touch and long-lasting print, directly coloring the fibers of the fabric.