Hexachrome Printing - Print Processes

The Hexachrome system uses six colours instead of the conventional four used in traditional colour print.

By supplementing the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black with Orange and Green it is possible to produce a greater range of colours accurately. The results can be a much more vibrant and high impact print.

If you are interested in printing using this system later versions of Quark Express and Coral Draw are Hexachrome enabled. Pantone® have also produced plugins for use with Adobe InDesign, adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop.

Alternatively, we may be able to convert the design you have supplied to include Hexachrome colours or images.

The most widely publicized hifidelity ink configuration is justifiably the Hexachrome process. Hexachrome certified inks are not the run of the mill cyan, magenta etc. inks but have brighteners to achieve a cleaner color resulting in a larger color gamut. You really aren’t taking advantage of the Hexachrome process if you just add orange and green to your normal CMYK ink set. The Hexachrome process was introduced in 1996 by a direct descendant of Pantone’s founder; Pantone boasts 90 percent or better matching with Hexachrome certified inks and paper combinations.
Hexachrome requires color management ICC profiles for conversion. Ideally the RIP will recognize and use embedded ICC profile information for bitmap graphics and allow default designation for EPS. If the RIP does not support six color ICC profiles, pre-seperate them in Photoshop or Illustrator using the PANTONE HexWare plug-ins or within a page layout program. Verify that the RIP accepts pre-separated files like DCS 2.0, EPS or PDF to get around proprietary color systems. Proprietary color systems utilize tables instead of standard ICC profiles.
In most cases two additional colors work best instead of odd color configurations. You wouldn’t really want to build a five color ICC profile of just an additional red primary for photographic output. Adding blue with red primary provides the complimentary color to balance hue back. So a RIP that does not support five or seven channel ICC profiles is not necessarily a limitation.
Offset and sheet-fed printers charge a premium for additional spot color bump plates because of the additional make-ready and clean-up in the printing. Hexachrome ink configuration minimizes make-ready and clean-up. The time, materials and labor savings alone justify using a six color configuration. Jobs designed for four color plus spot plates can be converted to Hexachrome process to allow more jobs on the same press without clean-up between jobs.

For most full colour printing conventional colour made up of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black is quite acceptable. Where extra vibrancy and impact is needed Hexachrome may be the answer. Using an extra two colours - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black plus Orange and Green, a much greater range of Pantone® colours can be reproduced accurately and pictures can look much more vibrant. We offer Hexachrome as an option on any Full Colour print job. Simply specify that you would like your job printed in Hexachrome at the start of the design process. The only extra cost is the premium for the printing.