EXTENDED COLOUR GAMUT PRINTING – A REVIEW

Are you looking for ways to enhance your printing performance, get an exact colour shade and maintain colour consistency in all your branding efforts while saving money? The Extended Gamut Printing Method may be just what your business needs.

WHAT IS EXTENDED COLOUR GAMUT PRINTING (ECG)?
ECG is the methodology of introducing three additional ink colours, namely Orange, Green and Violet (OGV) to the CMYK Process Colours, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black during printing.

Adding the extra colours extends or expands the range of colour printing and helps to reduce the overall dependence on spot colours. The resultant printed images are a lot more vivid with negligible colour difference.

WHY DO WE USE ECG & HOW DOES IT WORK?
The ECG Printing Method is primarily used to work around the limitations of CMYK colours and custom spot colours.

Considering that every brand/customer has a highly specific shade or colour preference, finding that perfect shade can be a challenge and often requires using many different pantones and increasing costs of buying/matching and retaining these pantones.

Even though using spot colours with CMYK colours can widen the available colour range for printing, using separate pantones for each customer is a costly and prolonged task. You always have to maintain a good stock of colours and bear the wastage of ink, etc.

What’s more, when working with special colours, you can’t perform multiple jobs on the same colour palette. All these issues are handled well by using the ECG format.

In the Extended Colour Gamut Printing Method, we add Orange, Green and Violet inks to the traditional CMYK ink set and printing begins. Next, inks are overlapped to get the desired shade and the job is done!

BENEFITS OF EXTENDED COLOUR GAMUT PRINTING
Here are some top benefits of the ECG printing method –

• Faster and more efficient printing.
• Impactful and superior print quality with greater colour consistency.
• Ability to match up to 95% of colours from the pantone guide and get the desired shade.
• Easier to work on back-to-back printing.
• Reduces wait time on account of colour mixing and cleaning between print jobs.
• Eliminates wastages caused by unused inventory.

The Extended Colour Gamut Printing format is quickly becoming the preferred choice for printers, packaging experts, brands, and designers alike. No wonder, the future of Extended Colour Gamut Printing looks promising.

Do you have a question about the ECG method? Feel free to get in touch with me and I will be happy to assist you.

Written by
Chetan Jain
Author | Packaging and Shrink Sleeve Expert | Entrepreneur