A process of controlling the gloss of a thermal dye transfer image comprising: (a) imagewise-heating a dye-donor element comprising a support having thereon a dye layer comprising an image dye in a binder, the dye-donor being in contact with a dye-receiving element, thereby transferring a dye image to an image-receiving layer of the dye-receiving element to form the dye transfer image; and (b) thermally transferring a protection layer on top of the transferred dye image, the protection layer being applied from an element which contains unexpanded synthetic thermoplastic polymeric microspheres, the microspheres having a particle size in the unexpanded condition of from about 5 to about 20 &mgr;m, the protection layer being transferred using a given energy level in order to expand the microspheres until a desired gloss level is obtained.