HOW'D WE PRINT THIS?: Plugged-in Metallics

Metallic ink can add sizzle to otherwise typical 4-color jobs. Special metal effects used to be costly for the average customer. If they did splurge, most wouldn’t use more than one metallic color since each required a separate pass through press. Besides, mixing entire batches of Pantone-matched metallics wastes ink and money.

A more predictable and economical approach, demonstrated on this month’s cover, is offered by MetalFX (MFX). A prepress plug-in allows more than 600 metallic colors to be created by laying down a base silver or gold ink and over-printing transparent CMYK. When run in the first printing unit followed by measured values of process inks in the other units, the base inks can create hundreds of metallic colors. First demonstrated in the U.S. at Print 05, MFX earned “Must See ’em” recognition at last year’s Graph Expo.

With Starter Packs costing under $500, MFX is the next generation of metallic design, offering designers a full range of metallics per page. Best of all, it’s the first metallic system to ensure consistent repeatability. Metallic colors traditionally have been almost impossible to measure due to the pigments’ random light refraction. But with MetalFX, the metallic ink is constant and the CMYK values can be measured globally, meaning a reliable result every time.

“MetalFX base ink works differently than normal metallics,” says Anne LoCascio, senior art director for Graphic Arts Monthly. “It doesn’t all float to the top, permitting anti-scuff coatings [such as the aqueous used on this cover] to enhance rather than dull down the lustrous effect.”

That’s what makes the conventionally printed penguin “pop” on the background of glistening, icy imagery. Microscopic aluminum Metalure platelets dispersed in the vehicle—the liquid part of the ink that carries pigments—remain below the surface. Developed by Eckart, the proprietary Silvercoat, non-leafing ink stays equally dispersed, says U.K.-based MetalFX Technology Ltd. (now a Ciba Specialty Chemicals subsidiary).

The technology, now licensed by 190 printers in the U.S., is available through five distributors here: Fujifilm Graphic Systems, Hostmann-Steinberg, Oldham Group, Pitman and Wolstenholme Int’l. GAM’s LoCascio simply opened the original CMYK image in Adobe Photoshop and applied the Action Sets (supplied on CD) to create the fifth color channel. She then created a clipping path around the areas designated as non-metallic—the penguin image and adjacent typography—to delete them from the base channel.

The non-metallic rules around type in the metallic silver/green GAM logo were created in Illustrator; 4-color process was used in the “Sustaining” text. LoCascio loaded the colors on screen as swatch palettes via InDesign and Illustrator plug-in.

The entire process was compatible with the magazine’s normal PDF workflow. The cover was proofed electronically using MFX’s PrintDevizor, which visualizes colors on screen with an animation program. A Canon color proof also was pulled to double-check the InDesign transparency areas and drop shadows.

Read more online about how to design for MetalFX and why traditional metallic inks are so expensive—and watch a three-minute video about MFX—at www.graphicartsmonthly.com.