Blacklight Trick Print Presented by Kobundo

Printing – what in the world is SlashGear talking about printing for, that's just for graphic design and artwork, right? I say thee nay! This is totally sweet and everyone's going to love it, I'm telling you! This project involves Kobundo, a group that call the following method Trick Print, it being a method of printing which combines luminous RGB ink with regular CMYK ink in a single pass. What's this mean to the lay person? It means that instead of having to lay down CMYK colors from their cartridges first, then RGB second (something noone would do anyway,) they've figured out a method for lying down two color sets at once.

And that's not all, these prints react to backlights! Welcome back to psychedelia! What Kobundo have done is to print images to look rather unassumingly monotone in normal light, while with a backlight shining at them, they appear perfectly bright and colored correctly as they'd normally appear with no special light at all using traditional printing techniques. But how is this single pass accomplished?

In a rather simple way, as it turns out.

By taking out CMYK cartridges not needed for certain prints and replacing them with the special luminous alternate RGB inks, the first step is accomplished. Once this is set up correctly, the folks at Kobundo start up their specially formulated software created specifically for this technique, running the printer all at once for one single dual-image print.

As Keizo Ohashi of Kobundo notes:

"The effect changes according to the material we choose. So in the beginning we have to go by trial and error. Here the yellow Lamborghini turns red. But the colors might be stronger or weaker, and conversely it is difficult to turn a red Lamborghini yellow. This is something people won't understand until they try it. People who have some experience can understand it, but in the beginning they don't."

"We want people to see the accuracy of these colors and once the see it they understand, because "A picture is worth a thousand words". Rather than people just saying "It glows", we want people to be more surprised and say "It's beautiful!"."

This technique can be seen in the video below, as presented by Diginfo:

Sound like a technique you'd like to try out? Finally, a gift for your weird uncle who lives in a backlight world, only emerging from his den of darkness for more pizza and video games. A delight!

[via Akihabara News]