GIMP Version: 2.8.14
Operating System: Mac OS
GIMP Experience: Basic Level

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Hello

I am making a design for a fabric transfer onto a white shirt. The image I have designed is on a pure white background (FFFFFF). It is white during the entire process, designing, exporting, looking at it in Apple Photos, but as soon as I preview it in when I'm trying to print, it reveals that the background has this strange, very faint light grey hue to it. I don't know what's going on because I've made sure the background is pure white.

Any advice? It just ends up being a little unsightly, not to mention a big waste of ink to color the paper off-white.

Thanks in advance. Sorry if this question seems silly.

Does the designed image on it have black or dark colours? They may have spread out onto the white if you blurred it at all.
Did you do the white on a separate layer before merging into one?
Couple of printers that i know of always print darker - make sure your printer is callibrated properly.
Don't know if you can do a transparent background for a transfer - thus not having a white back ground at all
I cannot think of anything else. Maybe those more talented in this area can help you

voltenbas: I can think of several reasons why this is happening and the solution will depend on the reason, of course.

To start with the most obvious point: have you actually done a proof print on an ordinary paper and seen the grey background? The thing is, the preview might not be 100% accurate. That's the first thing to check. If you worry about wasting ink, just cut a strip of an area of the image where you could see the grey background in the preview, save as a new image, and proof print with that.

If you've already proof printed and seen the problem on paper, the next step I suggest is to double check your exported image in gimp again. Close it down after exporting, open it again and take many samples with the colour picker from different parts of the white background, just to see that you don't actually have different colours in there. If you export to jpeg you can get that effect quite often, especially if you exported at low quality. You could try exporting at higher quality or exporting as a png. and see if that makes a difference.

If you've colour checked in gimp and had no different coloured pixels, open your image in another graphics program and use the colour picker the same way. If that too shows only white pixels, the issue is not with the actual image, and you need the help of someone who knows anything about techie things.

If you did get the different coloured pixels this time around, you should open it in gimp again. Open a new image at a high resolution, fill it with white, and crop your first image down to show as little white as possible, then paste it into the new one. Export that one as a png and preview, hopefully that will give you a white background.

That's as much as I can think of doing without actually seeing your xcf and exported image, hope you got something out of it!

What export format are you using? GIF? JPEG?