Hexachrome
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 (but not inkjet printers using lighter CMYK "photographic dye" with identical hue, e.g. the "CcMmYKk" process) use similar technology for the same reason.
While the details of Hexachrome are not secret, use of Hexachrome is limited, by trademark and patent [1], 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 output this is converted using a six-channel ICC profile provided by Pantone.
