When it comes to putting a design on your substrate, you have to consider what you’re trying to achieve. Are you going to be pointing something out of dark background? do you want it to stand out? You want it to blend in? Do you want it to have a certain feel to it? You want to feel the transfer either you want it not to be noticed. On sublimation, you have to use quality sublimation ink and sublimation paper to print the image onto the paper.
Take it to the substrate and then use heat to transfer the image onto the substrate. Let’s walk through the process, basically what you have to do is, take an image that printed out from the computer once it’s dry put it onto the substrate.
In case of a shirt, take a heat press, clear that other heat press for the specified time in the specified temperature. Then take it off and your design is done. you can only sublimate on things that are actually coated at the factory that the while they died at penetrating so you can’t do it on everything.
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Advantages of Sublimation
Sublimation is great for color. It can be used for whether two-color printing but sublimation is a great process for full-color graphics of the variety of substrates.
It’s great for putting photographic images on t-shirts, mugs and any sublimatable item.
Full-color sublimation is less expensive than the other methods.
When you get into month multicolor heat transfers at screen printing the cost rises considerably. Each additional color is an additional expense but these methods are more cost-effective than sublimation and whether two colors but not in the four color.
Sublimation becomes part of the substrate unlike heat transfer, can’t be felt, they won’t scratch and it won’t wash off and it can be safely hand washed.
Disadvantages of Sublimation
It takes more time, this is mainly due to the amount of time it takes to print the paper for the transfer to take place.
With fabrics, you really should use 100% polyester. if you use anything else like a 50-50 blend of cotton polyester you’re probably not going to get the kind of results you want. You can doubt that any case uses what 100% cotton.
For the fabric goods, you could only use factory coated items. The factory actually puts according on that’s specifically made for sublimation and this is what you need to use to transfer the image onto the substrate.
It can be UV susceptible basically what this means is that it may fade in direct sunlight. The sublimation inks these days are better and better so there’s less or problem with that but still, there is going to be some fading but as time goes out this is less and less of a problem.
Some coatings are not dishwasher safe. if you intend to use your product in a dishwasher.
there are size limitations and these are based on primarily are two things 1. the resolution of the image 2. the size of the heat press which is the normal way of transferring the heat so that you put the image of the substrate.
Basically, the more megapixels is a picture, the bigger you can make the image. As far as the limitation of the heat press you can actually tile the image so that you could put it out in pieces so it’s not as big of limitation there’s a might be but once you start making it that big the input resolution becomes a problem.
The biggest disadvantage to sublimation is that the juice is restricted to white or light-colored fabrics like light pink, light blue or like yellow. you cannot use it on black or navy blue or deep colors and this is really a severe limitation because most people don’t just want a white t-shirt, a white sweatshirt they want color and a lot of people like dark colors.
You could do sublimation on a variety of substrates but you can basically go to plain white substrate
