Direct-to-Garment Printing

Direct-to-garment, or DTG, digital printing is a state of the art apparel printing process that’s great for short runs, highly color-complex designs, or even photographic images.

Using a cyan, yellow, magenta, and black (CYMK) color palette, digital garment printers are capable of producing thousands of colors with a single pass of the print head. This technology is ideal for small runs or highly color-complex images because no screens or films are necessary.

Our digital apparel printers work just like your desktop printer at home. The main difference, of course, is that our printers are much larger and equipped with high-tech, water based inks that are specially formulated for textiles.

We offer direct to garment digital printing in a couple of different ways. If you are printing on a colored cotton shirt, i.e. non-white cotton shirt, then printing with a white ink underbase is the only kind of digital printing application that will work for your order. This white ink primer coat, or “underbase”, creates a white canvas space on your garment onto which we can apply bright and punchy print colors for your design. If your order calls for white cotton shirts then you have a choice with which digital printing application you’d like to use. You can still use the white ink underbase printing method if you would like your print colors to “pop” and be vivid. Or, you can also choose our “soft-hand” digital printing method which does not involve the use of a white ink underbase. Instead, we print the colors of your design into the fibers of the white cotton garment. This makes a print that’s completely textureless and soft, however this method does not yield bright and vivid colors. When using this “soft-hand” digital printing application, your design will appear more faded or washed out. This makes it a great method to use when your design is intended to appear more vintage or sub-dued.

 

ARTWORK

For your artwork, most file formats like ai, pdf, eps, psd, tiff, or jpeg are acceptable. Rasterized art or vectorized art is fine, though we recommend at least designing your graphic at its “life-size” or actual printed dimensions and set at a resolution of 300 dpi.