With digital textile printing technology becoming more and more advanced, the complexity of the images that can be printed and the quality of the final outcome is becoming more sophisticated and impressive. Professional digital photography can now be successfully printed with an incredible photo quality on to textile surfaces, given the right technology, ink and substrate.
Jamari Lior is one such photographer that is turning to textiles to display her photography. Based in Germany, she has cooperated with the Indian Institute of Photography, Fine Art Brazil, The Jamaica Photography Society and the University of Trier. Lior has been getting her photos printed by CCS digital_fabric, also based in Germany. In particular, Lior has worked with CCS on putting her photography on to CCS-style canvas fabrics. Using this substrate “makes them [the photos] stand out and gives a dreamy atmosphere,” says Lior. “It works especially well with pictures in which colour plays an important role.” She adds that the outcome is ‘awesome’.
Romance: A photograph by Jamari Lior that can be printed using digital textile printing to achieve
photographic quality on textiles
Peter Zöller, CEO at CCS, says: “When we set up our showroom in Duesseldorf, Germany, in 2016, we designed it in a gallery-style where we showcase different artists with their work. The artworks are available at the store or online at store.ccs-style.de printed on textile as frontlit or breath-taking backlit. When we saw Lior’s work for the first time we immediately thought about showing her images in our gallery.”
CCS focuses on printing high-quality photos onto textile substrates, which is clamped in the ‘fabric frame’ system developed by the company. “Digital high-end textile printing for home, office, retail and events, backlit and acoustic modules are available. These make rooms more beautiful, brighter and quieter. At our location in Dusseldorf, Germany, we offer all solutions from the planning, through the complete production, up to the comprehensive quality control from a single source,” says Zöller.
He adds: “Our main markets are retail, exhibition and events where high quality is required. We also produce graphics for offices, hospitals and hotels, as front and backlit frames, as a design element or to optimise the space acoustics. Our daily printing and sewing capacity reaches 6,000 sqm per day for retail applications and our maximum print size is 3.2m-wide.”
CCS, which started using digital textile printing technology as early as 1996, uses sublimation inks, with up to eight colours and on a range of its own fabrics. To get the photographic quality required for prints such as Lior’s, Zöller says: “We develop our own fabrics with mills all over Europe to achieve the best surface for our images. The sublimation technology dyes the actual fibre, which keeps the surface structure as is like photo prints. The good thing with our high-resolution fabrics is that they can be folded and stored in small boxes. The fabric is crease free when tensioned in our frames.” The company’s fabrics are 100% polyester-based and are sometimes made from recycled yarns. “Depending on the final application it can be a very thin voile for windows up to a heavy tent style fabric for outdoor or decoration purposes,” adds Zöller.
Lior has always focused on digital photography so for her, using digital textile printing instead of more traditional methods was always, ‘the right next step.’ For the photographer, the benefits include working with ‘various layers of different textiles’, the ability to create individualised products with ease and the wide range of substrates that can be printed on. Zöller agrees with this, he adds: “There are so many different applications like furniture wall coverings and advertising that can be printed on.”
However, he continues, “the biggest benefit with digitally printed fabrics is the ease of shipping, the brilliant colours and that there is less reflection on the tensioned images, especially with backlit fabrics.”
However, although compared to the early days of digital textile printing, technology has reached a high-quality production level with printers now more reliable than ever and inks and software getting more advanced, there are some critics that say digital textile prints have not yet reached photo-quality. Despite this, Zöller argues: “At CCS digital_fabric we try hard to convince new customers that we have the capability to print photo-quality prints and photographers and artists like Lior were impressed with the quality.” And, to keep on improving this quality, Lior notes that photographers and print design artists need to work more closely with print houses such as CCS to begin ‘planning at early stages to achieve the best results.’
