Why can't I sublimate onto a dark material?
This is not ink. This is a dye. Adding a little color to something that is dark doesn't do much of anything. If you have a bucket of black paint and add a cup of green, what do you get? It doesn't make the paint green. It may add a hint of green to the black, but you might not be able to notice.
Why can't I fix a spot on shirts like in screen-printing?
This is not ink that sits on top of the fabric. It is a dye that penetrates the fiber of the fabric.
There were some spots on my transfer I didn't see before pressing. How do I remove them?
If the shirt is 50 to 100% polyester, the chances are 99.9% that you cannot remove the spots. If you can, you are probably not transferring your images correctly, or there is something else seriously wrong. You can try bleach, but it shouldn't work. If sublimation is done correctly on polyester, the dyes are permanent, as they have become part of the fabric.
Can dye sublimation be used on ceramics, glass and metal?
All of these products need a coating, which is a special layer of polymer for the dyes to bond.
Can I sublimate plastics?
You cannot sublimate onto just any piece of plastic. Many polymers cannot withstand the amount of heat needed to achieve sublimation. Even if they could stand the heat, the added pressure and press time will deform them. Many of them melt and shrink. (Fiberglass Reinforced Plastic (FRP) is the plastic of choice.
Do fabrics have to be 100% polyester?
You can’t sublimate onto cotton because the dye particles are designed to bond with polyester and ignore everything else. Fabric enhancers, preparation sheets and sprays are used to add a layer of polyester to non-polyester fabrics so you can sublimate onto these fabrics. This technique works better on 50/50 shirts, since the added polyester can bond better with the polyester that is already part of the shirt, and then the dye also will have more polyester with which to bond. However, if you wish the image to be as bright and vibrant as possible, you must use 100% polyester.
JPEG Compression versus TIFF Quality
As you apply greater amounts of JPEG compression, an image gets smaller in size and at the same time it undergoes a certain degree of degradation of image quality by virtue of the process.
The tiff image has crisp and clean edges. This image will reproduce well. The jpeg on the other hand has much softer edges that appear fuzzy, plus there is some “noise”
(unwanted pixels) which gives the image a “dirty” look. In most cases, the noise is
not readily visible on the computer, but shows up during printing
There is no going back!
Since the jpeg compression process removes image data, once an image has been compressed (or over compressed), the damage done is permanent. Even if you try to convert the compressed jpeg image to a tiff image, you cannot fix the issues. Unfortunately there is no repair for an over compressed JPEG image
