Sublimation is a versatile digital printing process that uses specialized waterbased inks and controlled amounts of heat and pressure to infuse images into polyester fabrics and poly-coated objects.
According to Grand View Research, the global dye sublimation printing market is projected to grow from $16.85 billion in 2026 to $39 billion by 2033. A lot of the growth will come from the increased sales of custom apparel, personalized gifts, and promotional materials through online stores.
Apparel: Sublimation printing can add patterns, numbers, images, text and colors to apparel made with polyester and blended fabrics that have a high polyester content. All-over patterns can be applied to fabrics that will be cut and sewn to make garments.
The sublimation process is popular for short runs of apparel worn close to the body, including swimwear, leggings, baby clothes, socks, T-shirts, sweatshirts, sports jerseys, jackets.
Home Goods: Sublimation is also used to decorate textiles that will be cut and sewn to make pillowcases, drapes, and tablecloths, upholstery, casino gaming tables, children’s play mats, cornhole bags, eyeglass cleaning cloths, tote bags, and more.
Soft Signage: Display-graphic companies use wide-format and super-wide format printers to print banners, backlit retail and trade-show displays, table skirts, and photo and event-stage backdrops. Some outdoor framing systems make it possible to use sublimation fabric for billboard advertising.
Rigid Panels and Objects: Sublimation can add images and text to personalized products on rigid substrates and objects. You can buy sublimation-ready blanks for making products such as dog tags, coasters, flipflops, ornaments, key chains, indoor and outdoor signs for the home, luggage tags, coffee mugs, shot glasses, beer steins, water bottles, wall tiles, phone cases, cutting boards and more.
Sublimation Transfer: The inks are first jetted onto sheets or rolls of specially coated transfer papers. A heat press or rotary heat press (calendar) applies the precise amount of heat and pressure to transfer the printed image to the fabric or poly-coated object. Sublimation transfer papers are optimized for companies that print on a single type of product.
General-purpose transfer papers work with both non-stretch textiles and rigid objects. Specialty transfer papers are available for high-speed production printing or ink transfer for stretchy fabrics.
Direct-to-Fabric: The inks are jetted directly to rolls of fabric, then heated to fix the inks to the fabric. This method is particularly well-suited for 3-meter and 5-meter-wide inkjet printers, because it eliminates the time and expense of unloading rolls from the printer and reloading them on to a separate 3-meter or 5-meter calendar.
Natural feel: Unlike screen-printing or heat-transfer surface-decoration processes, sublimation printing doesn't alter how the printed garment or photo product feels to the touch. Sublimation is popular for apparel that will be worn close to the body.
Durability: Because the inks are embedded beneath the print surface, the printed image is resistant to water, abrasion, cracking, and fading. Sublimated photographs on poly-coated metal panels don't need to be framed behind UV-filtering glass or acrylic to resist fading. Sign blanks for outdoor use include a coating to prevent fading in the sunlight.
The newest dye-sub inks offer improved UV resistance, and greater color retention after repeated washes.
Vibrant Colors: Manufacturers now offer ink colors that expand the range of colors that can be produced with CMYK dye-sublimation inks.
Some wide-format sublimation printers can be configured with orange and violet inks for wider color gamuts, light cyan and light magenta for smoother gradients, or fluorescent inks for high-visibility sportswear, safety gear, and fashion apparel.
High Image Quality Fabrics: Instead of placing dots of ink directly on the fabric to form colors, the sublimation process produces continuous-tone photo-quality images with ultra-smooth transitions between colors and shades. Skies, skin tones, and shadows can be reproduced without distracting bands or visible dot patterns.
Production Costs: Sublimation inks cost less than the UV-curable inks used to produce durable indoor and outdoor prints on fabric. Sublimation fabric graphics typically cost less to ship to trade shows than signs printed on vinyl or rigid boards. Soft signage fabric typically weighs less and can be folded or rolled into a smaller package. Durable sublimated fabric graphics can be re-used at multiple locations.
Sustainability: Because polyester fabric can be reused and recycled, it reduces the volume of landfill waste compared to signs made from vinyl and some rigid materials. The sublimation inks are water based, and don't contain the solvents or photo initiators used to make eco-solvent or UV-curable inks.
Makers of fabrics for fashion and apparel like sublimation because the process doesn’t consume water like analog textile printing does. Traditional textile printing required textiles to be steamed, washed, and dried before being cut and sewn for products such as garments, bedding, curtains, or upholstery.
Plus, with digital processes such as sublimation printing, garments, and textile products can be manufactured only in the sizes, colors, and patterns that customers have ordered. This keeps unsold inventories of garments and textiles from ending up in landfills.
Entry-level sublimation printers (8.5- to 24-inches wide) and heat presses are available for start-up home-based businesses who want to produce and sell small, customized or personalized products. These printers can also be a good way to learn about the sublimation before investing in bigger equipment.
Production sublimation printers (44 to 64 inches wide) can make fashion apparel, jerseys, costumes, bedsheets, blankets, tapestries, snowboards, metal photo panels, and banner-stand display graphics.
Grand-format printers (up to196 inches wide) are available to produce higher volumes of smaller prints or to make seamless, easy-to-ship billboards and out-ofhome advertising displays as well as backdrops for trade shows, store window displays, museum exhibits, event stages, TV studios, and theme-park attractions.
After the graphics are printed, specialized finishing devices are required.
In addition to heat presses or calendars, you may need a digital laser cutter that can keep the edges of the fabric from fraying. Some laser cutters are built specifically to contour-cut stretchy printed fabrics into the shapes and dimensions needed for feather flags or pillowcase graphics that cover barricades or other display hardware.
Graphics companies that sublimate fabrics may need specialty sewing equipment to attach a thin, flexible silicon strip (keder) to the edges of graphics that will be displayed in SEG (silicon-edge-graphic) aluminum framing systems, When the keder is properly inserted into the grooves of an SEG system, the images looks wrinkle-free and frameless.
Mikkelsen Innovation has developed FASTSEWN automated sewing and lasercutting systems to consolidate some of the steps used to produce supersized soft signage for SEG frames.
Manufacturers and developers of sublimation inks, workflow software, transfer papers, and printing equipment are working hard to overcome some of the challenges that limit the adoption of sublimation.
New coatings and fabrics make it possible to achieve acceptable sublimation results on a wider range of fabrics made with recycled polyester, polyester/cotton blends, performance fabrics, and sports technical textiles.
Expect improvements such as increased color vibrancy, outdoor durability and inks that can add metallic and foil-like embellishments.
Companies such as Fisher Textiles, Aberdeen Fabrics, Berger, Textiles, and have developed wide-format and grand-format rolls of fabric for sublimation transfer, direct sublimation, and/or SEG framing systems. The whiteness of the fabric is optimized for printing accurate and consistent colors.
Higher-release transfer papers are engineered to release a greater percentage of ink during transfer. This will result in stronger color density without the need to oversaturate the paper, less ink waste, and lower cost per print.
Setting up repeatable, efficient, quality-controlled workflows for each product your shop offers is key to achieving greater profitability.
Modern sublimation automation systems can use AI to generate artwork, support variable-data printing for large orders of customized garments, adjust designs for multiple sizes of garments, and nest garment panels to avoid wasting fabric.
AI is also helping reduce the complexity of using custom ICC profiles to manage color in sublimation processes. AI color management for sublimation combines ICC profiling, automated calibration, and predictive algorithms to achieve the consistent color that higher-volume production requires with less manual effort and waste.
Once you have an efficient workflow established, you can use Ordant printmanagement software to track actual production costs and produce more accurate estimates.
With Ordant, it is easy to incorporate sublimation workflows alongside workflows for products made with other printing equipment, including UV flatbed printers, ecosolvent wide-format printers, label printers, direct-to-garment printers, or offset presses.
You can also integrate web-to-print storefronts that accept online orders from either business customers or consumers. Incoming, prepaid, pre-approved job files can be automatically routed to the appropriate printer being used for production.
Ordant software also makes it easy to adjust pricing as your supply and production costs change.
To see why Ordant is radically different from most Print MIS and sign shop programs, schedule a demonstration at www.ordant.com