Hexachrome is a discontinued six-color printing process designed by

Pantone Pantone LLC (stylized as PANTONE) is a limited liability company headquartered in Carlstadt, New Jersey. The company is best known for its Pantone Matching System (PMS), a proprietary color space used in a variety of industries, notably graphic ...

Inc. In addition to custom

CMYK The CMYK color model (also known as process color, or four color) is a subtractive color model, based on the CMY color model, used in color printing, and is also used to describe the printing process itself. The abbreviation ''CMYK'' refers ...

inks, Hexachrome uses orange and green inks to expand the color gamut for better color reproduction. It is therefore also known as a CMYKOG process. Hexachrome was discontinued by Pantone in 2008 when

Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the crea ...

stopped supporting the HexWare plugin software. While the details of Hexachrome were not secret, its use was limited by trademark and patent to those obtaining a license from Pantone. The inventor of Hexachrome is Richard Herbert, who is also the president of Pantone Inc.

Software

In order to use the Hexachrome process in a digital printing process, Pantone produced a plugin for

Adobe Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Microsoft Windows, Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas Knoll, Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the indu ...

that allowed the designer to work in an

RGB The RGB color model is an additive color model in which the red, green and blue primary colors of light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. The name of the model comes from the initials of the three addi ...

color space A color space is a specific organization of colors. In combination with color profiling supported by various physical devices, it supports reproducible representations of colorwhether such representation entails an analog or a digital represent ...

more typical of computer work. The plug in was called HexWare, which contained a set of Adobe plug-ins used by printers and designers who used the Hexachrome system. Older versions of

QuarkXPress QuarkXPress is a desktop publishing software for creating and editing complex page layouts in a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) environment. It runs on macOS and Windows. It was first released by Quark, Inc. in 1987 and is still owned and ...

and

Adobe InDesign Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application produced by Adobe Inc. and first released in 1999. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, ...

also came with the Hexachrome system already installed and enabled.

Purpose

The main purpose of Hexachrome was to create a printing ink system that could depict brighter and clearer pictures by being able to produce more accurate colors. Using this system instead of the CMYK ink system also allowed for printing more accurate skin tones and pastels. The Hexachrome system let users print images from computer screens that were not able to be accurately duplicated before. As well as producing more accurate color photo reproduction than previous systems, Hexachrome also increased efficiency as it was able to match many more Pantone

spot color In offset printing, a spot color or solid color is any color generated by an ink (pure or mixed) that is printed using a ''single run'', whereas a process color is produced by printing a series of dots of different colors. The widespread offset ...

s. Designers would specify Pantone spot colors when designing logos, but many of the Pantone colors could not be produced using the CMYK color system, requiring additional passes on the press for each Pantone color, increasing printing costs. By using the Hexachrome system, a wider range of custom colors could be printed on the same pass as the color photo images.

Users

Hexachrome was used by software companies including

Aldus Corporation Aldus Corporation was an American software company best known for its pioneering desktop publishing (DTP) software. PageMaker, the company's most well-known product, ushered in the modern era of desktop computers such as the Macintosh seeing ...

, and

Quark A quark () is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. All commonly o ...

and printer manufacturers including HP,

Epson Seiko Epson Corporation, or simply known as Epson, is a Japanese multinational electronics company and one of the world's largest manufacturers of computer printers and information- and imaging-related equipment. Headquartered in Suwa, Nagano, ...

, and

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (ha ...

References

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External links

*
Pantone Hexachrome patent announcement news release, May 26 1998
{{color space Printing terminology

Software

Purpose

Users

See also

References

External links