Dye Sublimation Printing Basics, Plus, Can You Dye Sub Print on Dark Fabric? Question: Is it possible to print dye sublimation inks onto darker substrates or fabrics. You can do it, but it probably won’t look that great. The short answer would be, “why?” The longer answer follows. Even double-sided fabric banner materials printed using dye sublimation barely pass the viewing test because there is just enough black block out visible to make the material appear slightly grayish-white. Make no mistake about this…it is going to affect the color of your print. A bright red may now show up as a slightly less bright red, and a yellow will also be affected slightly toward a duller yellow as well. If the print is a photographic print, and it covers the entire background of the banner, it will not likely show up much because the eye will adjust to the print. If there is a lot of white showing, most people will not pick up the slight diminution of the coloring on the print, but an astute observer might. If you were to use a red or blue material, though, you might be able to sublimate a black image onto a colored material, but it might be difficult to find the material to create this bi-chromatic style of print from any printable fabric distributor. This would, of course, beg the question as to why you would even want to start with red when you could just as easily sublimate print a bi-chromatic image on a white fabric anyway.
Question: What exactly is dye sublimation printing? Even though I’ve answered similar questions in previous posts, I enjoy explaining dye sublimation printing on fabrics and cloth and other substrates because the science of dye sub printing is fascinating to me. I have no idea how someone came up with the idea of printing dye on a treated paper, marrying it to a piece of fabric, rolling it between heated rollers at high pressure to create a gaseous explosion which gets sealed into the polymeric cellular structure of polyester fabrics and other polymeric treated surfaces. Who thinks up these things!? If you didn’t’ quite get that last paragraph, let me describe it in a little more detail, one process at a time. The Ink Set Printing: Dye sublimate printing uses a CMYO ink set. This is similar to CMYK, but instead of CyanMagenta-Yellow-Black, it uses Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Overprint. The overprint ends up black through some chemical process that I haven’t yet figured out, but obviously, someone has because it works.