Inks
Spot Colours
The Pantone® corporation produces the main print industry colour matching booklets that are accepted worldwide to be the industry standard.
With Spot Colour Print the specific colours chosen are applied by the press. So if you want to print violet and pink then it is violet and pink ink which is put in the ducts of the press. Full Colour Print can get close to many colours but if your requirement is for an exact match, for instance for a Corporate Letterhead, then Spot Colour is the best solution. |
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For simple jobs requiring only one or two colours it is often the case that Spot Colour is not only better than Full Colour in terms of colour fidelity but also considerably less expensive.
If you intend to create artwork regularly for spot printing, then it would be essential to purchase a Pantone® spot colour swatch booklet.
All good graphic design programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, CorelDraw and Freehand have the ability to enter Pantone® reference numbers to provide a representation on screen, but it is not a substitute for using the swatch booklet.
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Process Colours
Process colour is always made up of four colours, hence the name 4/c process:
cyan (C) magenta (M) yellow (Y) black (K)
These four colours are mixed together using varying percentages to create thousands of colours. When you specify a process colour, you do it by specifying a percentage value for each of the four colours.
A negative is made for each colour: one negative for everything that prints in cyan, one negative for everything that prints in magenta, etc. This adds to the expense of process colour: with spot colours, you'll normally only need two, maybe three negatives. Then add in the cost of a proof, and you'll begin to understand why process colour is often more expensive, unless you find a printer who specialises in colour printing and has greater economies of scale.
You'll need a Pantone® swatchbook in order to accurately pick process colours. Keep in mind that not all spot colours translate well to process colours.
What Graphics Should Be Process?
A colour photograph means you'll be using process colour. If you create a logo that uses four or more spot colours, you may find it's more cost efficient to use process colour than spot colours.
Hexachrome
Hexachrome is Pantone®'s six-color color printing process. In addition to custom CMYK inks, Hexachrome adds orange and green inks to expand the color gamut, for better color reproduction. It is therefore also referred as the CMYKOG process.
Some printers use lighter CMYK "photographic dye" with identical hue, e.g. the "CcMmYK" process, but for a different purpose. These ink sets provide smoother blends, particularly in areas with low saturation. They do not, however, extend the limits of the color gamut of the device, which is still constrained by the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks.
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Some inkjet printers have incorporated the same concept of extended gamuts, including printers from Canon (Orange and Green) and MacDermid Colorspan (Blue, Orange, Red, and Green, for a CcMmYyKkBORG configuration).
While the details of Hexachrome are not secret, use of Hexachrome is limited, by trademark and patent, to those obtaining a license from Pantone®. Typically, software that works with Hexachrome does not require a designer to specify the amounts of each ink. Instead the designer uses RGB colors tagged with a specific ICC profile, and as part of raster image processing this is converted using a six-channel ICC profile provided by Pantone®.
Currently the only programmes which support Hexachrome directly are QuarkXpress or CorelDraw on either the PC or Apple Macintosh platforms. Pantone® have also produced plugins for use with Adobe Indesign, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop.
Hexachrome colour swatch books are available from Pantone®. Solid Pantone® colours or particular ‘house’ colours need to be matched to their Hexachrome equivalents.
There are currently no economical ways of proofing Hexachrome, always try a small print run to ‘prove’ the artwork before a large Hexachrome job is printed
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Metal FX®
MetalFX® Technology is a Universal Process and Spot Metallic Colour System that allows millions of metallic colours to be printed, all by adding only the one MetalFX® base silver ink to the usual CMYK mix.
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Previously, if a client required more than one metallic colour in their print job, the corresponding amount of spot colour inks would have to take up an extra colour pass each (one for gold, one for silver, one for metallic blue and so on). Due to the added expense, printers would often have to compromise or disappoint clients that wanted to use multiple metallic colours.
MetalFX®, however, enables an unlimited amount of metallic colours to be printed all at once and at no extra cost. All that is needed is a five-colour press. The process is therefore inspiring to designers, economical for brand owners and easy for printers, of which hundreds are enquiring about MFX® Licenses worldwide.
MetalFX® is a revolutionary concept for the printing industry and was born from an idea to create dazzling print effects, whilst minimising the cost implications often associated with the printing of metallic colours.
The system incorporates MetalFX® colour palettes in the form of a metallic colour swatch book and plug-in software which has been translated into a range of libraries for mainstream software such as Adobe Photoshop®, Illustrator®, Artpro®, Indesign® and PageMaker®, as well as Macromedia Freehand® and QuarkXpress™.
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