Inking Outside the CMYK Realm

He says Opaltone was inspired by a scanning experiment in which he used a two-pass process to increase the color range of an image—he would scan for CMYK in one pass, and then scan a second time for RGB saturation. Encouraged by the results, he studied the work of Harold Kuppers, who wrote a patent in the early seventies on seven-color printing. "The difference between his patent and mine is that he actually replaced secondary colors in the image, similar to a Hexachrome system," explains Bernasconi. "I had decided that wasn't the major deficiency in the process. The main deficiency was saturation, or getting that 'layering' of the color."