DTF Printing - Direct - to - Film printing

DTF is an abbreviation that in full is Direct-to-Film printing. This is a very new method of printing any kind of shirt or cloth and it is being rapidly used by a lot of people in the creative industry of printing. Over here, we want to provide everyone the opportunity to have some understanding of how the whole process of DTF Printing goes.

There are two major devices or machines that help to do this type of shirt printing and they are:

• A DTF printer

•  A heat press 

The DTF printer is a special machine developed purposely for this type of printing and it uses a special ink and powder both made specifically for this type of printing. The film on which the images are printed is a roll and it is fixed inside the machine alongside the DTF ink and the DTF powder. The machine is advanced such that it prints a full colour work and it is a very smooth process.

The Heat press

This is a machine with a feature of heating to a certain temperature and then can be used for the DTF printing. The inks used for this print type are made in a way that after a design is printed on the film and placed on the shirt, when pressed with the heat press, the printed design becomes volatile and is transferred to the shirt or fabric. The shirt or fabric is then allowed to cool after which the paper which is actually like a rubber is peeled off. Just like that, the print is permanent and the pressing takes about 10s to complete.

Indeed, technology is making a lot of procedures and processes a lot more easier, the stencil printing and screen printing which were in use some years ago are now been faded out except for some few projects that they are used. DTF Printing is actually very fast to do.

The Process

First of all, the design process of the print work begins with a brief or better put the design to be printed. For this work, a specific file format is used and this is PNG(Portable Network Graphics). One reason why this file format is used is the fact that it saves images without background hence its suitability for the work. 

After getting the design ready, it is printed using the DTF Printer - which we will not look at today. The mechanism used is that after making the print on a special paper, the design is placed on the shirt and then heated with the heat press.

The image above shows a logo printed using the DTF machine on the paper or rubber which is ready for printing on a shirt. No process of colour separation is required but rather everything just moves smoothly like that.

The image above also shows a printing done using the DTF printing method.

What you should remember

DTF means Direct-to-Film

It is a modern type of printing that involves the use of the DTF machine and a heat press to make a print on all types of fabrics and it is time efficient.