- Case Studies
DTG printing, also known as direct to garment printing, is a way to print on textiles, usually on ready-made garments like T-Shirts.
Similar to your printer at home, you print directly on the T-Shirt. All colors mix automatically with CMYK inks, which means that you can print a lot of designs that are unachievable with other printing methods like screen printing. For example, since you can use an unlimited amount of colors in the same design, you can print photorealistic images and gradients. But there is another benefit: The real superpower of direct to garment printing is the white ink.
With this, you can print a white underbase underneath every design. This gives you the possibility to print on garments of all colors. Did you know that we offer a free Ebook about DTG printing when you subscribe to our newsletter? You can unsubscribe at any time. Yes, I want my free Ebook Subscribe me to the newsletter.
In resume, Dtg is a printing technique used to print designs onto textiles and other garments. Technically speaking, Dtg uses inkjet technology to print whatever you want on the substrates.
The easy explanation is, think about the paper printer you have in your office or at home, but modified to print on t-shirts. Nowadays these printers can be found in three different categories and can fulfill the needs for different outputs:.
The smallest version is tabletop printers with one pallet, which are perfectly suited for smaller productions. And last but not least there are hybrids, which are often a combination of screen printing and Direct to garment printing machines. Depending on the output of your printer, the curing requirements of the ink, and the available space on your print shop, curing can be done with either a heat press, a tunnel dryer, or a combination of both. Before printing anything, you should use a primer on your garments.
When you only use CMYK inks, this process is optional. But when you want to print with white ink, then you absolutely need to use pretreatment. Internal Pretreating Process: The printer automatically applies the pretreatment before the start of the printing process.
But since this method is restricted to a few printers only, many of us have to utilize other methods of pretreating our printed T-Shirts. External Pretreating Process: Everybody else has to pretreat their garments outside of the printer. Or you can invest in a pretreatment machine who automates this process.
There are several pretreatment machines in the market in various shapes and forms. Even though the printing process of screen printing and direct to garment printing could not be more different, basically the outcome is the same: Both printing methods do the same: They print on T-Shirts. If you are trying to decide between those two methods, it ultimately boils down to the type of design you want to print. We put together an infographic to illustrate the differences.
As you can see, when you plan to print simple designs , both printing methods are suitable. If you are wondering why we made the tick a little bit smaller for direct to garment printing, it is easily explained.
Sometimes it can be tricky to print large, solid-colored areas. But if you need to print designs that need to match to specific color values like Pantone , stick to Screenprinting. Even though there can be quite a few possible causes for printing problems in direct to garment printing, it often boils down to three main culprits:.
Here is another video where we talk more specifically about five reasons for washability problems and what you can do about it. The first point of contact is usually the supplier of your printer. They offer training on how to use their machine properly and how to handle all the fluids correctly. The same goes for the manufacturers of additional equipment like curing units or pretreatment machines.
When you get your print shop up and running, we can only recommend to not start printing commercially immediately but instead reserve a little bit of time for testing. During this time, you want to make sure to figure out the following:.
We created a course that shows you exactly how to do these things. Visit learn. This means, that everything you see in your design will print. Even artifacts from low resolution or white pixels which will be printed with white ink. In this short video, we talk about seven options to create T-Shirt designs, ranked from our least to our absolute favorite.
We included options for beginners and pros alike. We talk about different software options you can use to create T-Shirt designs, for example, Canva, Affinity Photo, Krita, Gimp, Affinity Designer, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Procreate, their pros and cons, and how we use them to create illustrations and designs for T-Shirts.
In this video, we have a special guest, Maggi, who explains to us her design process to create TShirts in Procreate. You can find a designer who is specialized in creating designs for Dtg printing on many platforms like Fiverr or Upwork or community places like Mintees.
About us. All Procreate Tutorials Videos. Direct to Garment Printing. August July June Online Course: How to put your art on a T-Shirt 7. March Screen Printing April T-Shirt Business. February May All Free Ebook Videos. Table of Contents. Screen Printing.
