Mirror an image for a transferMirror your design for iron-ons

Reverse your design before printing, so it reads the right way once it is pressed onto fabric.

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Before

Flipped

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.

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	Checked against
Inkjet transfer paper, light fabric	Mirror it	The printed sheet is pressed face down onto the garment, so the press reverses whatever you printed.	Avery: mirroring for light T-shirt transfers2026-10-18
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.	Avery: dark transfers are not reversed2026-10-18
Heat-transfer vinyl, cut	Mirror it	The vinyl is cut from the back with the carrier side down on the mat, weeded, and pressed carrier side up. The cutter works on the reverse of what ends up facing out.	Printable Press: mirroring heat-transfer vinyl2026-10-18
Printable heat-transfer vinyl	Do not mirror	The artwork is printed on the face, cut, and applied face up, so it is printed the right way round. If a cutter is involved it handles its own pass.	Printable Press: mirroring heat-transfer vinyl2026-10-18
Sublimation onto a mug, tile or polyester	Mirror it	The printed paper faces the substrate while the ink turns to gas, so the image transfers reversed.	Johnson Plastics Plus: mirroring sublimation artwork2026-10-18
Sublimation on the back of glass, viewed through it	Do not mirror	The press reverses the artwork once, and looking at it through the glass reverses it again. Two reversals cancel, so the file is printed as it should read.	Johnson Plastics Plus: mirroring sublimation artwork2026-10-18
Temporary tattoo paper	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.	Hallmark temporary tattoo instructions (PDF)2026-10-18
DTF (direct-to-film) transfer	Mirror it	The film is printed reversed and pressed ink side down, so the artwork must be mirrored once — but the printer's RIP or controller usually does it. Check that before mirroring the file.	Caldera (RIP vendor): image mirroring in DTF printing2026-10-18
Window decal applied inside the glass, read from outside	Mirror it	The decal faces into the glass and is read from the other side, through it, so the artwork has to be reversed to read correctly from outside.	Reasoned, not sourced2026-10-18
Rubber or self-inking stamp die	Mirror it	A stamp prints the mirror image of its die, so the die has to carry the artwork reversed for the impression to read correctly.	Reasoned, not sourced2026-10-18
Screen-printing film positive	Ask your screen maker	Film positives are usually printed right-reading and placed emulsion side down on the screen, but it depends on which side of the film carries the emulsion and how your screen maker works.	No verdict2026-10-18
Laser engraving on the back of clear acrylic	Mirror it	The engraving is viewed through the sheet from the front, so it has to be cut reversed to read correctly.	Reasoned, not sourced2026-10-18

These 12 rows are the same ones the panel under the picture answers from; each carries the page it was checked against and the date, most recently 2026-10-18. Rows marked “reasoned, not sourced” follow from which way the printed face ends up but have no manufacturer page behind them yet. 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 — which is what the proof sheet in the panel is for: print it on your material, press once, keep the half that reads correctly.

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. The proof sheet answers it for your own material.
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?

Yes. The batch page takes up to fifty files, applies one axis to all of them and hands back a ZIP, and since this release it runs the same reflection, the same container decision, the same source-derived quality and the same metadata transplant a single file gets — so a design reversed there and the same design reversed here are the same file. What it does not do is rename by pattern; the outputs keep their own stems.

Related pages here

Artwork

Printed for the transfer

Reversed artwork on the transfer sheet becomes readable again once it is pressed face down onto the fabric.