WHAT IS DESIGN FOR PRINT?//COLOUR:HEXACHROME//OUGD504

HEXACHROME:
Hexachrome was a six-color printing process designed by Pantone Inc. In addition to custom CMYK inks, Hexachrome added orange and green inks to expand the color gamut, for better color reproduction. It was therefore also known as a CMYKOG process. Hexachrome was discontinued by Pantone in 2008 when Adobe Systems stopped supporting their HexWare plugin software. While the details of Hexachrome were not secret, use of Hexachrome was limited by trademark and patent to those obtaining a license from Pantone. The inventor of Hexachrome was Richard Herbert, who is also the president of Pantone Inc.  -WIKI

Hexachrome is an ultra-high fidelity six-color process printing system developed by Pantone, Inc. It's large color gamut, compared to four-color process printing, makes it possible for the first time to more accurately reproduce a wide range of both vibrant and subtle colors that can be defined and displayed on computer monitors which previously could not be duplicated in print.

In Hexachrome, the existing CMYK primaries were modified into more chromatic inks, with orange and green being added to the traditional equation. In addition to reproducing more brilliant continuous-tone images, Hexachrome is capable of accurately reproducing over 90% of the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM® Colors, almost twice the number that can be obtained using conventional four-color process printing. This Designer Hexachrome Primer will show how to create a design using QuarkXPress™ that includes image separations using an Adobe® Photoshop® plug-in called PANTONE HexImage™, creating vector art in Adobe® Illustrator® with the PANTONE HexVector® plug-in, and creating a layout in QuarkXPress 4.0.4 with Hexachrome colors.

The prepress workflow for Hexachrome is similar to traditional CMYK, but color management systems need to be properly set up and plug-ins are required to enable support for Hexachrome in applications that do not have built in support. The printing workflow is the same as conventional process printing except there is six of everything instead of four.

Hexachrome Printing

What Is It:

• 6 color process makes up to 94% of the pantone colours
• Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, Orange  and Green
• With six different inks, color changes are made in the digital art files supplied
• Files are set to match existing pantone colors and to take advantage of the orange & green to make your job 'pop'

What does it take to do it right:

• Pantone Certification
• Densitronic ink monitoring system. Color corrects as job is running
• Sentinel ink system to control proper ink flow
• Updated digital files environmental sustainability
• 6 inks vs hundreds of pms colors = reduced ink waste
• Less ink obsolescence
• Fewer washups, less solution to dispose of
• Reduced sheet waste