A Study of High-Chroma Inks for Expanding CMYK Color Gamut

The number of possible reproducible colors in a printing method is called the color gamut. The need to satisfy the growing quality demands and produce color match has given rise to the use of expanded color gamuts. There are many ways to achieve an expanded color gamut, including printing with Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black (CMYK) plus additional inks, printing with higher ink film thickness (IFT), and printing with high-chroma inks. The purpose of this research is to study the relationship between color gamut volume, metric chroma (C*), IFT, and solid ink density (SID) for regular and high-chroma inks in offset printing process. This is done by performing ink drawdowns to understand the behavior of high-chroma and regular inks in order to determine IFT and corresponding ink saturation densities using the Tollenaar and Ernst equation. Subsequently, the research compares color gamut volume between regular and high-chroma inks using Presstek 52DI offset printing process. The measurement is carried out with i1 Pro 2 spectrophotometer and X-Rite i1 Isis2