Call me uneducated, ignorant, dumb, whatever you’d like; but never call me 4 color process again! Have you seen IndiChrome? HP’s answer to quality unseen in the digital press world has revealed itself to me in a real way. I was walking through the office recently and saw the most beautiful eye-catching piece I’ve seen in a long time. It was an 8 page brochure printed on a gloss stock utilizing IndiChrome technology with an overall gloss UV coating. For those of you outside the print world, that meant it was bright and shiny and glossy all over. And it was beautiful. All the colors seemed as if they were jumping off the page. IndiChrome’s color configuration is CMYK+OV! That is an added 2 colors (Orange and Violet) that increase the gamut of color you can achieve exponentially. The images were of these life-like tropical fish and seemingly neon coral. I was moved by the piece so much that I had to learn more.

I went to our digital prepress guru and asked for his infinite wisdom to be divulged on such a fledgling as myself. He prompted me to a quick tutorial as to achieve the best results when designing for this particular application. Apparently if I were a designer the information he was spewing would have sunk in, but what I took from it is two things. First - the files you build to apply the IndiChrome coloration must begin, whether in Quark or any Adobe Native product, in RGB. This is atypical of the design process as most begin projects in CMYK and proceed from there. Beginning the process in RGB sets your file up for the most success to be as beautiful as the one that caught my eye today. Of course not every project you have needs to be printed this way. It definitely serves a purpose to those few projects that need to be taken to another level.

I think you’ll enjoy the results, and I would love to offer you more knowledge on this particular issue, but you’re going to have to dial me up for that one. I am hitting the books to learn what you need to know. That’s what we do at Reynolds DeWalt.

So til next time, too-da-loo, see ya in a few.