Special Inks

Hexachrome For most 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. In the Hexachrome Process the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black colours are supplemented with Orange and Green. This means a much greater range of Pantone® colours can be reproduced accurately, and pictures can look much more vibrant and life-like. Currently the only programmes which support Hexachrome directly are Quark Express 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. Normally exports from a programme do not support the Hexachrome Channels, which means that a full Hexachrome design must be carried out in one programme. However, using the plugins, elements of a design can be carried out in any of the Adobe suite of programmes.
	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.
Metal FX Metal FX® is a process which allows any number of metallic colours to be incorporated in to a conventional CMYK print job. An ultra opaque fast drying silver is applied in various tints in the areas to be metallized and tints of CMYK inks are applied on top to produce the metallics. The eye-catching effects that can be achieved are possible without the excessive extra cost normally associated with process plus spot colour print. New releases of Corel Draw, QuarkXpress, Illustrator etc are planned to incorporate the Metal FX® technology. Currently, however, no software supports the system.If you would like to incorporate Metallic colours in to your next design simply design in CMYK as normal. On the print out accompanying the file, detail the areas to be metallized and the colours to be used. The Metal FX® process is most effective on Gloss Art Paper. Whilst good results can also be achieved on Silk Art (Business Cards) or Matt Art (Handouts) the results are less predictable. There are currently no economical ways of proofingMetal FX®. We would always recommend a small print run to ‘prove’ the artwork before a large Metal FX® job is printed.