DTF Printing for Your Designs: What Are the Advantages?

Have you heard about DTF printing? Not yet? Then it’s probably time. We introduced this style of printing to our range at the end of 2021, and well we’re pretty impressed. Here you can find out why!

Different designs require different printing methods. On our Marketplace we’ll always find the right method for your designs and products. Most designs are printed with the infamous allrounder, digital direct printing. But for accessories made from more rigid materials, including caps, bags or products with particularly fine fibers such as polyester shirts we need to find a better match. This is when it‘s DTF (Direct-to-Film) printing’s time to shine.

DTF Printing Transfers: The Ins and Outs

Digital printing involves spraying your designs, just like an inkjet printer, directly onto the products. With DTF printing, however, your motif is firstly pressed onto a foil (or film). This allows for very exact ink quantities, meaning vibrant colors, opaque whites as well as remarkably sharp and fine edges. DTF film absorbs almost every drop of color, so even high levels of detail and color gradients are no problem.

Once the film has been printed, it gets a layer of adhesive, before being pressed onto the product, which sits in a pressing device. This makes DTF printing ideally suited for both light and dark products. It’s ultimately just as durable and stretchable as the product fabric. Here’s a quick summary of the main advantages:

Available for all file formats

Extremely stretchable and durable

Suitable for dark and light textiles

Compatible with cotton, polyester, blended fabrics and many other materials

Which products do we use DTF for?

Thanks to the moderate pressing temperatures, DTF printing is suitable for numerous different fabrics, whether coarse, fine or mixed.

The rougher materials include baseball caps, hats, bags and backpacks. But it also works well on T-shirts and hoodies, and on finer materials, in particular polyester fibers. As such, as they protect more sensitive fibers, DTF prints are perfect for sport and function shirts.

What do I need to look out for?

Basically, nothing. All our usual printing recommendations and requirements also apply to DTF printing, including:

Transparent Backgrounds

Best possible resolutions

No half-transparent prints.

Minimum line thickness of 1mm, as otherwise they can break away from coarser materials

You don’t even need to worry about which products you need to print with DTF. It’s part of our job as print-on-demand experts to find the printing style which fits your designs and ideas. That’s we set up the printing process to match each individual order.

Now you want to find out more about how we bring your designs onto the Marketplace? Let us know in the comments. Otherwise keep your eyes peeled for further reports on what we do.