The world of garment printing is evolving rapidly, introducing innovative technologies that make printing on textiles faster, more efficient, and more versatile than ever. Among these advancements, Direct to Garment (DTG) and Direct to Film (DTF) printing stand out as game-changing methods for producing vibrant, high-quality designs on a variety of materials.

Whether you’re a seasoned professional or exploring new ways to expand your printing business, understanding new technologies is key to staying ahead in a competitive industry.

In this blog, we’ll break down how DTG and DTF printing work, explore the benefits of each, and show you how SAi Flexi DTF DTG software makes these processes more streamlined and accessible than ever.

Ready to dive into the details? Let’s get started.

Direct to Garment (DTG) Printing

Direct to garment printing, often known as DTG printing, is the method of using a computer to transfer a digital image to a specialised printer that jets ink directly onto a textile or garment.

The way direct to garment printing operates is different from traditional screen printing in that you can swiftly print intricate images in numerous colours thanks to the relatively new technology. The print heads of a DTG printer spray CMYK ink and opaque white ink onto the surface of a garment. The ink dries and clings to the fabric by being heated, keeping the print in place.

Direct to Film (DTF) Printing

Direct to film printing is an even newer addition to the garment/textile printing industry. The process is slightly different from DTG in that, as the name implies, the design is not directly printed into the material but instead printed on a film before being transferred using a heat press.

The most notable advantage DTF has over DTG is that it allows you to print on most any type of fabric, such as polyester, nylon, rayon, spandex, cotton, etc. In DTG printing the only reliable material to print on is cotton.

SAi Flexi Software for DTG/DTF Printing

Direct to Film and Direct to Garment printing is one of the fastest-growing segments in our industry. SAi Flexi software for DTF DTG printing makes it easier than ever to diversify your business. A new, expanded feature set in Flexi simplifies artwork design and file preparation for DTF DTG printing, streamlining your workflow and saving you time on each job.

Benefits of SAi Flexi for DTF DTG Printing:

Easy to Use Interface

All DTF DTG tools are conveniently organized under one tab, so you won’t waste time scrolling through menu bars to find what you need. User-friendly dialog boxes allow you to quickly make changes to your artwork files. With Flexi, you spend less time preparing jobs and more time printing.

Versatile White Ink Workflow

White ink is an integral part of DTF DTG printing but can tricky if you don’t have the right software. Flexi gives you different workflow options for generating white layers quickly and easily. Whether you are working with .PNG or .TIFF files that have transparent backgrounds or artwork that contain no white at all, Flexi gives you the tools create transparencies, add masks, and assign white output channels with just a few clicks. For more precise output, you can also use Flexi to create multi-layer artwork with white on a separate layer from spot colours. Flexi gives you the versatility you need to easily handle different types of files without wasting time.

Higher Quality Prints Using Ink Removal

Everyone loves graphic tees, but no one wants a stiff, heavy print on their shirt. If you have a large print, you can give it a softer feel by using Flexi’s special DTF|DTG feature to “Remove Data in Texture Patterns”. This feature allows you to add squares, circles, or dash lines to your pattern. You can adjust the size and spacing of these elements to so less ink is deposited, giving your prints a high-quality, softer texture.

Less Material Waste – Preview Before You Print

Ink and media are expensive, which is why you want to make certain your job is set up correctly before you print. Flexi lets you preview each output channel within the Production Manager interface. Not only can you see how the white layer will print but you can also adjust the white ink density using a simple slider. With these Flexi tools, you can make certain the job is right without wasting ink and media.

Best of all, our textile design and printing software is available on a low-cost monthly subscription plan that easily fits your budget.

About SA International (SAi).

Headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, SA International (SAi) is recognised as the global leader in providing software solutions for the sign making, digital printing, textile, and CNC machining industries - from design to production.  SAi's Flexi family of software products rank as the world's number one software for sign making and digital printing, outselling all competitors combined.  Flexi is found on more wide-format printers than any other software.  In addition, the company is one of the leaders in the CNC machining and router markets with its EnRoute CAD/CAM software.

SAi has a large and loyal network of resellers around the world and has over 250,000 customers in more than 150 countries.  SAi enjoys strong OEM relationships with industry-leading manufacturers.  In addition to its USA headquarters, SAi has offices in Brussels, Belgium, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Shanghai and Hong Kong, China, Pune, India, Tel Aviv, Isreal and Tokyo Japan.

In the world of wide-format printing, colour management is not just a technical detail - it’s a cornerstone of quality and consistency. Whether you’re creating vibrant marketing materials, detailed fine art prints, or large-scale signage, ensuring accurate colour representation is critical to maintaining brand integrity and customer satisfaction.

The Challenges Of Maintaining Colour Fidelity

Wide-format printing comes with unique challenges. Variations in media types, ink formulations, and environmental factors can all affect colour output. Without proper management, what looks perfect on a screen might appear dull or inconsistent when printed. For businesses, this can lead to wasted materials, increased costs, and dissatisfied clients.

How ONYX Solutions Address These Challenges

ONYX’s award winning software simplifies colour management with powerful tools designed for precision and consistency:

• ONYX ColorCheck: This feature ensures colour accuracy by verifying output against industry standards. It allows you to detect and correct inconsistencies early, preventing costly reprints.
• Advanced Profiling Tools: ONYX provides robust profiling capabilities that adapt to various media and printer combinations. These tools help create and maintain colour profiles that guarantee accurate reproduction, no matter the material or application.
• Named Colour Replacement: Maintain a library of brand-specific colours to ensure every print adheres to exact branding requirements, essential for corporate identity and marketing campaigns.

Tips For Achieving Optimal Colour Output

1. Create Accurate Profiles
   Accurate ICC profiles are essential for reliable printing. Use profiling tools to match your printer, ink, and media, ensuring vibrant and consistent results tailored to your workflow.
2. Calibrate Regularly
   Printers and monitors naturally shift over time due to environmental changes and usage. Regular calibration helps maintain accuracy, especially when switching to new substrates or working in different conditions. ONYX Thrive’s ‘ColorCheck’ simplifies this process by creating a baseline swatch to detect variances and ensure consistency.
3. Use ONYX Tools
   ONYX software offers advanced tools like ‘ColorCheck’ and G7 calibration to monitor and adjust output quality. These features make it easy to spot and correct issues early, keeping your prints sharp and consistent.
4. Understand Your Media
   Each substrate has unique properties that affect how it interacts with ink. Testing and fine-tuning your profiles for different media ensures the best results, whether you’re printing on paper, vinyl, or specialty materials.

By combining these strategies with ONYX tools, you’ll maintain flawless colour consistency and deliver standout prints every time. Learn More With ONYX Understanding the nuances of colour management can elevate your printing results from good to exceptional. ONYX Graphics offers specialised color management training courses designed to deepen your expertise and empower your team with the knowledge to handle even the most complex projects. Take control of your colour today and see the difference ONYX can make in your workflow. For more details on training and ONYX solutions, contact PSW for further details

About Onyx Graphics, Inc.

Leading the market since 1989, Onyx Graphics is dedicated to helping customers increase productivity, reduce costs, and gain a competitive edge with superior software solutions for the print industry. Innovative, productive, and delighted customers around the globe help motivate the company to develop and enhance its leading-edge technologies. Global channel partnerships and longstanding relationships with printer manufacturers position Onyx Graphics as a market leader in powerful, reliable, large-format printing workflow and print business software solutions.

ONYX Graphics, a leader in RIP software solutions, proudly announces that ONYX 24 has earned full certification for the new HP Latex FS50 and FS60 printer series.  This certification from HP ensures that ONYX 24 integrates smoothly with HP’s latest printers, delivering excellent colour control, media management, job processing, and workflow efficiency. For print service providers, this means a streamlined, user-friendly experience that brings out the best in HP’s advanced large-format printing capabilities. 

Achieving full certification means that ONYX 24 has passed extensive testing by HP to confirm seamless compatibility and optimised performance with the HP Latex FS50 and FS60. This ensures that ONYX 24 can handle all key functions of these printers—from precise colour management to enhanced workflow efficiencies—so users can rely on consistent, high-quality results. 

Chukwuma Peter Eze, Manager of Product Management & Partnerships at ONYX Graphics, emphasided, “This certification highlights our commitment to providing solutions that enhance HP’s newest large-format technology. ONYX 24 is designed to deliver excellent colour accuracy, smooth job management, and expanded white ink options, helping our customers achieve high-quality, efficient print production.” 

Key Features of ONYX 24 for HP Latex FS50 and FS60 Printers:

• Enhanced Colour Management: ONYX’s proprietary colour engine offers precise colour control, taking full advantage of the broader colour range provided by the new HP Latex FS series. 

• Advanced Media Management: Easily manage different media types with ONYX’s Media Manager, designed for optimal ink usage and media savings across various applications. 

• White Ink Capabilities: Leverage advanced white ink options for unique applications, including spot colour overlays and layered printing on transparent media. 

• Print & Cut Workflow: ONYX’s contour cutting tools provide an efficient Print & Cut workflow, helping users make the most of their materials while improving finishing quality. 

With a focus on sustainability, the HP Latex FS50 and FS60 printers use water-based inks, producing odourless, eco-friendly prints without hazardous air pollutants. ONYX 24 complements this approach, aligning with HP’s commitment to environmentally conscious printing. 

About Onyx Graphics, Inc.

Leading the market since 1989, Onyx Graphics is dedicated to helping customers increase productivity, reduce costs, and gain a competitive edge with superior software solutions for the print industry. Innovative, productive, and delighted customers around the globe help motivate the company to develop and enhance its leading-edge technologies. Global channel partnerships and longstanding relationships with printer manufacturers position Onyx Graphics as a market leader in powerful, reliable, large-format printing workflow and print business software solutions.

Despite its size, the construction industry has long faced a productivity problem. In 2023, $13 trillion was devoted to construction projects globally, according to McKinsey. By 2040, the industry is predicted to grow by 70%. However, engineers and contractors are already struggling to meet today's project demands

The labour market is fiercely competitive, with shortages in essential roles like engineering and project management. Workforce shortages, retirements, shorter job cycles, and competition for talent have led to a decline in skills and experience. Consequently, construction productivity rose by only 10% between 2000 and 2022, compared to a 50% productivity improvement of the total economy, based on research from McKinsey.

Despite investments in digitalisation, manual processes still dominate workflows, risking human error and creating information siloes. Digitising the construction workflow end-to-end is essential for dramatically reducing the efficiency gap, which could create an estimated $1.6 trillion in additional value and meet half the world’s infrastructure needs.

Introducing HP Build Workspace

Launching today at HP Imagine, HP’s annual product innovation event, HP Build Workspace is a new mobile cloud collaboration platform that brings together all the essential stakeholders on complex building projects, such as urban planning, including architects, designers, contractors, and city planners. By simplifying complexity, improving communication and automating manual processes between the office and field sites, HP Build Workspace reduces construction project lead times from three days to as little as 20 minutes, depending on design complexity.

With seamless integration between digital and physical workflows, the HP Build Workspace platform also features HP Print AI capabilities and enables AEC professionals to:

• Effortlessly capture and organise site observations
• Vectorise their technical designs using AI
• Share floor plans
• Enable real-time feedback
• Automate field reports

Connecting Construction Site Layouts with HP SitePrint 3.0

In July 2024, ACCIONA delivered the design layout for the Alentejo Central Hospital 6x faster than manual methods and over 25,000 sqm of partition walls thanks to HP SitePrint. This is an example of how our connected technologies can significantly boost productivity in complex construction projects. We believe our innovations have the power to address the construction industry's productivity challenges, and our customers are already demonstrating what's possible.

HP Build Workspace combines three key innovations for an integrated, digitized and efficient construction solution:

• HP SitePrint, a robotic solution that prints complex construction site layouts with pinpoint accuracy, increasing productivity up to 10x compared to manual layout techniques (1).
• The print point of the HP SitePrint 3.0 is now up to 30% faster, offering boosted navigation speed and improved robotic capabilities to level up efficiencies in onsite operations (2).
• Additionally, we are working with large HP SitePrint customers on a Proof-of-Concept to check surface flatness, which will be available as a subscription service in selected markets by 2025.

Simplifying Your Printing Experience

The DesignJet T200/T600 Printer series 2025 edition is our most sustainable, intuitive, and optimised large-format printer yet, offering reduced energy consumption and minimising plastic waste by more than 50% with new molded fiber packaging (3). AEC professionals can print digital plans on paper with ease using HP Click Driver for real-print previews from any Windows 11 application. Already in beta in the US and Europe, we intend to scale these AI capabilities to the UK & Ireland soon and roll out worldwide starting next year.
 
More information on HP Build Workspace and our suite of digital construction tools can be found here.

About HP

HP Inc. (NYSE: HPQ) is a global technology leader and creator of solutions that enable people to bring their ideas to life and connect to the things that matter most. Operating in more than 170 countries, HP delivers a wide range of innovative and sustainable devices, services and subscriptions for personal computing, printing, 3D printing, hybrid work, gaming, and more. For more information, please visit: http://www.hp.com.

1. Based on data from HP SitePrint customers – comparing HP SitePrint’s performance to manual layout techniques used for the same job, including the customer’s estimation (time/resource) for manual layout based on experience working on similar projects. HP’s data typically finds manual layout methods average between 25m2 and 35m2 covered per hour, with a crew of two people. HP SitePrint’s performance averages between 180m2 and 300m2, with one operator. Exact improvement results will vary from project to project and can be influenced by multiple factors, such as the line density or the dimensions of the site.

2. Productivity improvements of up to 30 percent are in comparison to the performance of the previous software version, VP2.0. These results were obtained from conducting internal tests, where SitePrint printed CAD files with average conditions, including element density per area and printed linear density per area, representative of real user plots across various applications. Actual productivity gains may vary depending on specific customer applications and the unique characteristics of each job.

3. The HP DesignJet T200/T600 Printer series 2025 Edition plotter series use EPS-free packaging with molded pulp cushions made from recycled fiber-based material. The plastic reduction is expressed as a percentage of the total packaging plastic weight. The reduction varies depending on the printer model, with at least a 53% reduction in the new 36-inch model and at least a 72% reduction in the new 24-inch model, compared to the previous T200/T600 models.

For small businesses, especially print shops, keeping track of finances can be particularly challenging. Owners often juggle multiple roles, from managing day-to-day operations to handling customer service and marketing. Disorganised records, missed invoices, and inaccurate financial tracking can lead to cash flow problems and hinder business growth.

With limited resources, staying on top of financials can become overwhelming.  

With ONYX Align’s latest update, there’s a clear path to streamlined and efficient financial management. Introducing the new QuickBooks® Online integration - a revolutionary feature for print shops looking to simplify their financial operations. 

How Does it Work?  

This new feature allows ONYX Align to connect directly to QuickBooks, an online accounting software that assists in payroll, payments, and more. 

You can either create a new QuickBooks account to connect to your Align or use a pre-existing QuickBooks account. Either way, this new feature on Align allows you to establish real-time synchronisation between the two accounts to manage estimates, invoices, payments, customers, products, tax rates, payment methods, and payment terms. 

Effortless Financial Management 

Once you connect your accounts, you can enter any of your financial data into either ONYX Align or QuickBooks, and both accounts will automatically update with the information you input. This makes your financial management effortless and organised, eliminating the need for manual updates and reducing the risk of errors. 

Key Benefits of QuickBooks® Online Integration 

Direct Connectivity 

Establish a seamless link between your ONYX Align and QuickBooks Online accounts for streamlined operations. This direct connection ensures that your financial data is always up-to-date and accurate, providing a clear picture of your print shop’s financial health. 

Live Synchronisation 

Enjoy real-time updates of customer accounts, jobs, tax rates, payment terms, and methods. With live synchronisation, you can be confident that your financial records are always current, no matter where you enter the data. 

Estimate and Invoice Automation 

Experience the convenience of automatic creation and real-time status updates of estimates and invoices within QuickBooks Online, all issued directly from ONYX Align. This automation reduces the time spent on administrative tasks, allowing you to focus more on growing your business. 

Automated Payment Tracking 

Maintain up-to-date records with live synchronisation of all payment activities and invoices, enhancing financial tracking and reporting. This feature ensures that you never miss a payment and always have an accurate view of your financials. 

The ONYX Align team is excited to share this seamless integration with QuickBooks Online. This new feature ensures that your print shop has optimised and streamlined operations within your financial management. Say goodbye to the chaos of disorganized records and hello to clarity and efficiency. 

Ready to transform your print shop’s financial management?

To try ONYX Align today and experience the benefits of seamless QuickBooks integration contact PSW Paper & Print for an online demonstration.