Mirror an image for an iron-on or heat transfer
Reverse the artwork before it is printed, so that the press puts it back the right way round. Lettering that looks wrong on screen is the correct intermediate state here.
Nothing to hand? and watch the words reverse.
Nothing has been read yet. The two panels above are a drawing, not a file — the sign on the right is the one on the left reflected, which is the whole operation.
One reversal, once
What the operation does
Transfer printing has a physical failure mode that no other use of this operation shares: the shirt comes out with the words backwards, the sheet is used up, and the mistake is only visible after the press has cooled. The reversal itself is trivial. Knowing whether your method needs one, and making sure it happens exactly once, is the whole job.
The rule underneath every row of the table below is a single question. Does the printed face end up against the garment, or facing away from it? Face down means the press reverses your artwork and you must reverse it first. Face up means it does not.
| Method | Reverse the file | Because |
|---|---|---|
| Inkjet transfer paper, light fabric | Mirror it | The printed sheet is pressed face down onto the garment, so the press reverses whatever you printed. |
| Inkjet transfer paper, dark fabric | Do not mirror | The opaque film is peeled off its backing and laid face up. Nothing reverses it, and a mirrored file prints backwards. |
| Heat-transfer vinyl, cut | Mirror it | The vinyl is cut from the back, weeded, and pressed carrier side up. The cutter works on the reverse of what ends up facing out. |
| Printable heat-transfer vinyl | Do not mirror | It is printed on the face, cut, and applied face up. It behaves like the dark-fabric paper, not like cut vinyl. |
| Sublimation onto a hard or polyester surface | Mirror it | The printed paper faces the substrate while the ink turns to gas, so the image transfers reversed. |
| Temporary tattoo film | Mirror it | The sheet is pressed onto skin face down and the backing is soaked off. Lettering that reads correctly on the sheet will read backwards on the arm. |
Where a supplier sheet disagrees with this table, the supplier sheet wins. Papers and films are not standardised, and self-weeding laser papers in particular vary by product.
Four steps
Running it
- Crop and size first. A reflection commutes with a resize but not with a crop. Do the framing decisions before this step, so the panel on the right is the artwork that will actually be pressed.
- Reverse it here. This page opens on the horizontal axis, which is the one nearly every press uses. If your press loads from the far edge instead, use the vertical axis.
- Turn the driver setting off. Before printing, find the mirror image or iron-on setting in the printer dialogue and make sure it is off. Two reversals cancel, and the driver is the one that will do it silently.
- Print at full size. Scale to fit in a print dialogue will quietly resize the sheet and is the second most common way a transfer goes wrong. Print at one hundred per cent and measure the sheet before you press it.
What survives
Formats in, formats out
Transfer artwork is usually a PNG with transparency, and PNG is the right export here: it is written without loss, and the alpha channel survives so the film can be weeded or cut around the design. A JPEG source will re-encode on the way out, which for artwork with hard edges and flat colour is a visible cost — save it as PNG instead. Colour management is out of this tool entirely: an embedded profile is passed through untouched, and any colour correction for your particular film belongs in whatever drives the printer.
- This page cannot tell you whether your press reverses the artwork. The table above is the general case for each family of consumable. It is not a substitute for the instruction sheet that came with your paper, and a product that behaves differently is not rare enough to ignore.
- It also cannot see the printer driver. The most common failure reported for this operation is not a wrong file but a double reversal, and it happens entirely inside a dialogue this site has no access to. The check that catches it is printing one sheet on plain paper and reading it before committing a transfer sheet to it.
Asked often
Common questions
- How do I know whether my method needs mirroring?
- Ask one question: does the printed face end up touching the garment, or facing away from it? If the printed side goes down against the fabric or the substrate, the press reverses it and the file has to be mirrored first. If the printed side stays facing you throughout, it does not.
- I mirrored the file and it still came out backwards.
- Almost always the printer driver mirrored it as well. Many inkjet drivers carry a mirror image, flip horizontal or iron-on transfer setting, sometimes buried in a media-type preset that switches it on for you. Two reversals cancel. Mirror in the file or in the driver, never in both, and the file is the one you can check.
- Does mirroring change the print quality?
- No. The reflection reorders samples and nothing else; the resolution, the colour and the amount of detail are exactly what they were. What does change quality is scaling in the print dialogue, and that is a separate setting worth checking at the same time.
- Should the artwork be mirrored before or after it is resized?
- Either. A reflection commutes with a uniform resize: the result is the same whichever order you do them in. It does not commute with a crop, so if you are cropping to a placement, crop first and reflect last so that what you see in the second panel is the thing that gets pressed.
- What about a design that has no text in it?
- It still needs mirroring if the method calls for it, and the mistake is much harder to catch. Logos, faces, hands, tools, vehicles and anything with a diagonal all read as wrong to someone who knows the subject even when nothing is obviously backwards. Use the divider on this page to look for the asymmetry rather than trusting that there is not any.
- Can I do a whole set of designs at once?
- Not yet. This page reflects one file at a time. Batch reflection with a name pattern is planned and is not built, which matters here more than anywhere else on this site, because a transfer job is usually a sheet of designs rather than a single one.
Related pages here
- Printing a mirrored image
The long version, including the settings that undo your work.
- Reflect left to right
The same axis without the transfer material around it.
- Reflect top to bottom
For a press that loads from the far edge.