How to make holographic print with a UV printer?

Real holographic pictures especially on the trade cards are always intriguing and cool for kids. We look at the cards in different angles and it shows slightly different pictures, as if the picture is alive.

Now with a uv printer(capable of printing varnish) and a piece of special paper, you can make one yourself, even with some better visual effect if properly done.

So the first thing we need to do is to purchase holographic cardstock or paper, it’s the base of the final result. With the special paper, we would be able to print different layers of pictures in the same spot and get a holographic design.

Then we need to prepare the picture that we need to print, and we need to process it in the Photoshop software, make one black and white image that is used to print the white ink.

Then the printing starts, we print a very thin layer of white ink, which makes specific parts of the card non-holographic. The purpose of this step is to leave the certain part of the card holographic, and most part of the card, we don’t want it to be holographic, so we have the contrast of the normal and special effect.

Afterwards, we operate the control software, load the color image into the software and print in the exact same location, and adjust the percentage ink usage so that you can still see the holographic pattern under the areas of the card without white ink. Bear in mind that although we print in the same location, the image is not the same, the color image is actually the other part of the whole image. Color image+white image=the whole image.

After the two steps, you will first get a printed white image, then the colorful image.

If you have done the two steps, you will get a holographic card. But to make it even better, we need to print varnish to get a better finish. You can choose to print one layer of two layers of varnish based on the job’s requirement.

Furthermore, if you arrange the varnish in dense parallel lines, you will get a even better finish.

As for application, you can do it on the trade cards, or phone cases, or just about any other suitable media.

Here are some of the work done by our customer in the US: