Design for Print - Hexachrome

The main purpose of Hexachrome was to create a printing ink system that could depict brighter and clearer picture by being able to produce more accurate colors.^[4] Using this system instead of the CMYK ink system prints also allows for more accurate skin tones and pastels.^[5] The Hexachrome system, for the first time, lets users print the images from computer screens that were not able to be accurately duplicated before.^[5] As well as producing overall better quality than previous systems, Hexachrome also increased efficiency as it produces many more spot colors.^[4]Having more spot colors increases efficiency because it allows for the press to use one ink set for all jobs, rather than one specified ink set for each job. Keeping a printer configured for Hexachrome also eliminates the number of washes required on the printer; therefore saving times and simplifying printing production.^[4]

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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. Download the Designer Hexachrome Primer PDF