In this paper we present a novel fast method to find a specific colorant value (eg. CMYK) that has to be sent to a printer in order to obtain a required color appearance. Due to the general approach, the creation of ICC-profiles is also possible for printers using more than 4 ink types (eg. CcMmYK). The proposed method minimizes a prescribed cost function that can be used for example for GCR or UCR, in the region of the valid colorant values. At first, we construct a printer model based on a set of printed color patches, using the multilinear or “Partition of Unity”-method interpolation. In the second step, the space of the colorant values is cut into parallelepipeds which have to contain the desired colorant value. The parallelepipeds are sorted with the aid of the cost function and then step by step adaptively tested for valid colorant values. On a Athlon 1,2 GHz the colorant calculation in the CMYK color space takes about 3 ms. Measurement results are given in the text.