THE TROUBLE WITH COLOR is that there isn't enough of it -- not in the inks of a traditional four-color press. Real-world colors are far brighter, richer, and more varied than those created by the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks used by your desktop printer or a four-color printing press.
Last year, color-printing leader Pantone offered its solution to the limited color gamut, or range, of four-color printing: Hexachrome -- a six-color system that adds a bright orange and intensified green to tweaked versions of the familiar CMYK quartet. This year, professional color-application developers are rallying 'round the new system. Next year, expect your world to be a little brighter, as high-quality Hexachrome-printed materials start to crop up everywhere.
The Hexachrome system creates a color gamut well beyond that of traditional printing -- even beyond that of your color monitor. This results not only in richer colors but also in reduced need for spot-color press runs. To prepare images for a six-color press run, Pantone provides HexWrench, a Hexachrome-compatible color-separation plug-in for Adobe Photoshop. To aid in color consistency among applications, Pantone offers ColorDrive 1.5 color-palette management software.
Adobe includes Hexachrome support in PageMaker 6.0. Quark has announced support for Hexachrome in future products, including its flagship, QuarkXPress. Six-color desktop proofing devices are under development by major printer manufacturers -- tiny Colossal Graphics, of Palo Alto, California, already has prototypes of Hexachrome-compatible inkjet printers up and running.
Expect all the major color-publishing players to offer Hexachrome support in the months to come. The printed page will be a brighter place because of it. 800-222-1149 or 201-935-5500; http://ww .pantone.com/.
[More information on Hexachrome can be found on MacUserWeb, http://www.zdnet.com/macuser/, beginning April 19. -- Ed.]
