What’s dye sublimation, and what does it have to do with printing?
Dye sublimation is a process used for printing large projects on polyester fabric. As Heffington explains, it’s similar to using your inkjet printer at home, except the output is a 100-inch piece of fabric rather than an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper. The process begins with a special sublimation ink applied to paper, which is then put into a transfer machine on top of a piece of fabric. The machine’s pressure and heat (usually around 400 degrees) cause the ink to turn into a gas and dye the fabric’s fibers. The result is a photographic image on fabric that can be folded and even washed.

Is there a difference between printing with a four-color press and printing with spot colors?
With a traditional four-color press, printing is done with the four CMYK colors: cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black). Each color is laid down one layer at a time, and other colors are formed by various combinations of CMYK. The process is used by most newspapers and magazines. As evidenced

by the occasional blurry pages we’ve all seen, there is room for error when the layers aren’t perfectly aligned. Modern-day inkjet printers (including dye-sublimation printers) use the CMYK color set to print as well — with far fewer alignment problems.

It can also be harder for four-color presses to reproduce colors as precisely as some graphics people would like them to. In those cases, they turn to the PMS color chart and select specific colors for spot color printing.

This method works best for projects that will use only a few colors, since each spot color requires its own lithographic film and individual formulation and mixing of the required spot colors. The spot color printing process is mostly found in traditional screen printing operations.