HEXACHROME PRINTING
Traditional commercial printing uses 4 colours Cyan Magenta Yellow and Black. Cyan, magenta and yellow are what are known as the subtractive colour primaries, colour that theoretically, when mixed together should produce all of the visible colour spectrum including black when all three colours are mixed together. In reality only about half of the colours we can see with our eyes can be produced using these pigments. Black has to be added to the mix to help reproduce a black! black.
So what colours do not get reproduced?
Many very highly saturated colours, rich reds, ultramarines, many intense greens and bright oranges all suffer. When we look at a piece of printing these colour deficiencies are compensated for to a certain extent by our brains. Because the highly saturated colours are not reproduced well using conventional printing, artist's paintings and bright photographs will look lifeless.
Hexachrome was first introduced by the Pantone company as a method by which a printer could reproduce a better colour range. Orange and Green were added to cyan, magenta, yellow and black. This set of printing colours produce brighter reds oranges and greens, important colours for the artist and photographer. No matter what people tell you using only cyan yellow magenta and black even with light cyan and light magenta being added to the mix will not produce good reds, greens or oranges. As a traditional printmaking company we have a lot of experience in reproducing images using many colours for artists. We have created our own hexachrome separation curves to produce bright and lively results.
Conventional programs such as Photoshop cannot separated images into more than 4 colours and much of the colour profiling done by printing machine manufactures is of a very poor standard. The result of this is that almost all printers claiming to produce giclee art prints use just CMYK.
All our prints are produced in 6 colours then varnished and it shows!
Traditional commercial printing uses 4 colours Cyan Magenta Yellow and Black. Cyan, magenta and yellow are what are known as the subtractive colour primaries, colour that theoretically, when mixed together should produce all of the visible colour spectrum including black when all three colours are mixed together. In reality only about half of the colours we can see with our eyes can be produced using these pigments. Black has to be added to the mix to help reproduce a black! black.
So what colours do not get reproduced?
Many very highly saturated colours, rich reds, ultramarines, many intense greens and bright oranges all suffer. When we look at a piece of printing these colour deficiencies are compensated for to a certain extent by our brains. Because the highly saturated colours are not reproduced well using conventional printing, artist's paintings and bright photographs will look lifeless.
Hexachrome was first introduced by the Pantone company as a method by which a printer could reproduce a better colour range. Orange and Green were added to cyan, magenta, yellow and black. This set of printing colours produce brighter reds oranges and greens, important colours for the artist and photographer. No matter what people tell you using only cyan yellow magenta and black even with light cyan and light magenta being added to the mix will not produce good reds, greens or oranges. As a traditional printmaking company we have a lot of experience in reproducing images using many colours for artists. We have created our own hexachrome separation curves to produce bright and lively results.
Conventional programs such as Photoshop cannot separated images into more than 4 colours and much of the colour profiling done by printing machine manufactures is of a very poor standard. The result of this is that almost all printers claiming to produce giclee art prints use just CMYK.
All our prints are produced in 6 colours then varnished and it shows!



Normal CMYK produces thin reds and a poor Orange. The best bown colours are made from mixing orange and black. CMYK cannot produce good browns
CMYK greens are limited in range
The addition of orange to CMYK gives rich bright reds and enables good browns and flesh tones
The addition of green to the CMYK set gives wonderfull Turquoise coulours and renders landscapes with more life