With the advent of poly performance
wear, plus the hundreds of poly-coated
products available in the marketplace,
there are tremendous amounts of
opportunities for sublimation. (Image
courtesy Vapor Apparel)
dpi or better. Think garbage in, garbage
out. But truly, with sublimation, high-definition, photo-realistic images can be
printed if the artwork prepared to support the job is supplied.
Much like embroidery, a lot of jobs require the combination of a stock design
with text. The process for sublimation is
quite similar, but instead of using specialized embroidery software to accomplish
the task, you will depend on common
programs such as CorelDRAW or Photoshop, which are already owned by most
graphics businesses.
Stock clip art is used in place of
stock-embroidery designs. There
are numerous industry suppliers
that offer quality files, and note
that quality images are a must—in
most cases you get what you pay
for.
After the creation process, the
next step is to print the image onto
sublimation transfer paper. This
requires three key ingredients—
sublimation ink, a suitable inkjet
printer and sublimation transfer
paper. Sublimation inks can only
be used with piezo electric head
inkjet printers, so you will probably need to buy one to support
your operation. One key specification when shopping printers is
to pay close attention to the print
area. You can’t produce a 16" wide
design on a printer that only handles 8 1/2" X 11" paper.
A driver must also be installed
into the computer to manage the
printing process in association with
the sublimation ink. Typically, this
is provided at no charge when you
purchase inks and it’s a quick process to set it up.
The final element of the print process is
of course the sublimation transfer paper.
Transfer papers are not all created equally,
so check with your equipment supplier to
see which products are approved for use
with your setup. Once these three elements are taken care of, it’s just a matter
of loading the paper into the printer and
printing out the design.
An interesting point to note is that
colors of the printed image are nowhere
close to the colors of the final sublimated
image. (Think about a .dst embroidery
file—the colors are never correct in the
