Pre Treatment 5 gal for light shirts, IMAGE ARMOR LIGHT SHIRT FORMULA Pretreat solution for Direct to garment shirts

IMAGE ARMOR LIGHT SHIRT FORMULA Pretreat solution for Direct to garment shirts

LIGHT SHIRT FORMULA
5 gallon

Designed for use specifically on White and Light Colored Shirts

Allows the printing of CMYK ink only or White + CMYK

is NOT just a watered down version of our DARK Formula - brand new specifically designed for DTG printing

Increases image detail and brightness

Increased wash durability

No scorching or yellowing on white or light colored shirts

Great for white 100% polyester - makes it look like sublimation

Choice of:

1 gal

5 gal

Up until now, you really never had to pretreat white or light colored shirts if you were printing CMYK only designs (with no white under base). However, the colors were not that vibrant unless you printed a double pass, which wastes time and money. Even then, the results were only so-so.

Image Armor LIGHT Shirt Formula creates a whole new dynamic for the DTG printing world giving multiple options in printing your designs, with incredible results. First, if you are NOT printing a white under base on your garments, Image Armor LIGHT will provide unparalleled image quality sharpness, vibrancy, and wash durability. Simply apply Image Armor LIGHT using a spray gun or automated pretreatment application machine (which is recommended for repeatable results), dry and print.

Also, most other pretreatments do not allow you to print only CMYK inks onto the garment. These pretreatments are made for printing a white under base and then your CMYK inks. However, if you do print a CMYK only print on one of these pretreatments the print will look great prior to washing, but when it is washed it will fade dramatically.

Image Armor LIGHT Formula gives you the flexibility of printing a white under based on the garment and then printing your CMYK colors on top, while still giving incredible washability and performance capabilities. This allows for a variety of printing configurations including the ability to NOT print a white under base where the black ink is located. This results in using less white ink while still achieving incredible prints on the final garments.

In addition these great characteristics, we've recently developed a method for allowing Dupont® in users who WANT to print 100% polyester shirts to do be able to achieve this "holy grail" of DTG printing. As you can see in the image to the right, printing 100% polyesters is possible though black and red (and some other darker colors) are still slightly out of reach. You can see how we did it on our 100% Polyester Printing Without Using Different Inks page.

Here's a few guidelines for utilizing Image Armor LIGHT Shirt Formula.

CMYK ONLY PRINTS

Ink / Printer Compatibility

Dupont®

Brother®

Epson®

Garment Fabric Compatibility

White and Light Colored 100% cotton

White and Light Colored 50/50 shirts

White Polyester fabrics (some light colored fabrics may work, but a pretreatment "box" might be visible. Test prior to using in a production run.

WHITE UNDERBASE + CMYK PRINT

Ink/ Printer Compatibility

Dupont ®

Brother ® (May require Testing)

Epson®

Garment Fabric Compatibility

White and Light Colored 100% cotton

White and Light Colored 50/50 shirts (testing required to verify compatibility)

100% Polyester - Follow our GUIDE on how to print 100% Polyester to achieve the best results. (DARK Polyester fabrics excluded).

mage Armor Has Done it Again

100% POLYESTER PRINTING WITH REGULAR DUPONT INKS

Doing the IMPOSSIBLE is what we've always strived to bring to our customers. Products that improve the DTG printing experience is what drives us to constantly improve the direct to garment printing process. Up until today, polyester printing with DTG has been limited to CMYK only on light or white colored polyester shirts.

However, in our constant pursuit of perfection, we've taken another step closer to the holy grail of DTG printing - white inks on black polyester fabrics. WE'RE NOT THERE YET, but the results of our process speaks volumes about the direction of the DTG market.

Utilizing our existing Image Armor LIGHT Shirt formula, we have been able to achieve commercially acceptable white ink prints on mid-colored polyester fabrics. The process is relatively straight forward, but we are expecting the RIP manufacturers to follow suit to give end users this ability from within the RIP itself to make it much easier to accomplish. Currently we have to do a little "workaround" to make the magic happen.

STEP 1: Pretreat the Shirt

Pretreat the shirt using Image Armor LIGHT Shirt Formula. We utilized the Sport-Tek ST350 series 100% poly performance shirt (more on this in a minute) and applied 24 grams of pretreatment on the polyester shirt. The PT was then cured at 330F for two 20 second presses utilizing brown KRAFT type paper. I would not recommend using teflon as it will definitely shine up the shirt too much. The platen was raised to allow steam to escape and create a much more thorough and dry cure in between presses. We utilized a Stahl's Hotronix Air Fusion heat press with 70 psi. A little experimentation might find that slightly more PT may help.

A NOTE ABOUT POLYESTER SHIRTS: We must note here at this point that some polyester shirts are better than others for printing. We did not some discoloration of the polyester fabric on the yellows and greys with the Sport-Tek ST350's (it was not massive but some might find it unacceptable). However, we've seen some others that do not discolor. Sometimes this discoloration comes out in the wash, other times it does not. You'll need to do some research on what polyester brand and shirts work best for your shop.

STEP 2: The UNDERBASE is Key

Printing the under base is key to getting these polyester shirts with white ink to print correctly. Normally some RIPs will print a solid under base of white under the entire design on a gold shirt like in our example above. However, for technical reasons you will get poor results if you do that with this process.

What you need to do is act as though you are printing the design (specifically the under base) on a black shirt. If your RIP allows you to utilize the black of the shirt color for the black in the printed design, then the RIP will not print any white ink where black is in the design (the shirt would be the black ink of the design). This process generally creates awesome fades on the DTG prints. This is also exactly what we want for our mid and light colored polyester shirts as far as the under base.

This may sound counter-intuitive, but black ink does not technically need an under base beneath it to look good on any shirt. You can see on our grey shirt to the right, what this white under base looks like when printed. Notice where black would be in the image there is NO white under base - this is extremely important. FAILURE TO ENSURE THE BLACK DOES NOT HAVE ANY WHITE UNDERBASE UNDER IT WILL RESULT IN A LESS THAN DESIRABLE FINAL PRINT ON POLYESTER FABRICS.

Note, your RIP must allow you to ONLY PRINT this under base. You DO NOT want to print the CMYK associated with this RIP'd design. Why? Again, we are not printing on a BLACK shirt. That's why. So, you must be able to separately print the under base from the CMYK.

It might be noted at this time that the more white ink your printer can put down at this stage is crucial. Set it to a maximum amount of white ink. If you try to go back and print the under base again (as in a 2x under base) there will be massive bleeding of moisture around the edges of where the white ink and polyester meet. Try to bump up the white under base so it is dropping as much white ink as possible without over saturation to achieve a solid white layer of ink film.

STEP 3: Print the CMYK and HIGHLIGHT White

Now, we need to take the same exact image and print it in exactly the same place but with a CMYK + White Highlight option. In our RIP we utilized the CMYK + White highlight as though we were printing on a dark colored shirt (such as GOLD). This would normally print a solid white under base (which we do not use) and then the CMYK as normal with the highlight white.

What this achieves is allowing the BLACK ink to print directly onto the garment since there should be no white under base in those areas. And, we also get a highlight white to help augment the optical brightness of the white ink.

Please note, you may need to reduce the white highlight percent lower to keep the CMYK (especially black ink) from mixing with the wet white highlight being printed. In our case, we utilized a 50% highlight and 100% white under base (higher values may work - some experimentation will be required). The CMYK was printed at a standard 65% setting. Your printer and ink set and polyester shirts might require some testing on settings, but it is worth it.

Once the shirt is printed, we have to heat set the ink.

STEP 4: Cure the Ink

Here is where it can get sticky. We strictly adhered to Duponts technical sheet of the cure time for their Artistri inks. 120 seconds in the heat press at 338F. I would not recommend higher temps due to the shirt dyes sublimating through the white ink. This seems to give an incredible great balance to wash ability and optical brightness, even on gold 100% polyester fabrics.

Our curing parameters we used a Hotronix Fusion heat press (non-pneumatic) at a pressure of 3-4 on the digital display. Do not use too much pressure and "kill" the inks by pushing them into the shirt.

NOW WHAT?

The shirt is printed, cured, and ready to roll. We've found excellent washability with the white ink and CMYK prints utilizing this technique without having to purchase any additional or different ink sets while at the same time utilizing our popular IMAGE ARMOR LIGHT Shirt Formula. This reduces the number of pretreatments needed to achieve great results with all of your current equipment.

Now, since you understand our process, a little experimentation on your end and happy customers will make the hard work on this end all pay off.