Color control of the multi-color printing device

Conventional color-printing systems often use inks of three hues, such as CMY, CMYK and CMYKLcLm, but in order to obtain more realistic color reproductions, the ink set of more than three hues has been adopted by some color-printing systems. It is difficult, however, to model the composed color with the multiple inks when the number of the output ink hues exceeds three due to the none-unique mapping between the color spaces of the CIE Lab and the multi-color printing device. In this paper, we propose a fine color-printing method for multi-color printing device with the ink set of more than three hues. The proposed approach has good color expression ability and provides fine control of the printed color. By dividing the output color space into several subspaces, our method allows one-to-one mapping between the standard color space and the multi-color output color space. It has been proved effective when applied to the digital inkjet printer-Mutoh8000.