People are the principal subjects in the great majority of consumer photographs and the rich and vibrant reproduction of skintones in prints is an essential requirement for professional portrait and wedding photographers. Current ISO and WIR methods for the evaluation of image permanence in color prints only take into account fading in cyan, magenta, and yellow patches, as well as fading and color imbalance changes in neutral scale patches (at a single density of 1.0 with ISO 18909 and at two density points, 0.6 and 1.0 with WIR). The ISO and WIR methods do not directly address fading and color balance changes in human skintones. This shortcoming is particularly significant for prints made with complex inkjet inksets that, in addition to cyan, magenta, and yellow inks, may contain dilute cyan and magenta inks, as well as red, green, blue, orange, or other ink colors and multi-level black/gray inks. WIR i-Star, a CIELAB colorimetry-based, full tonal scale “retained image appearance” metric, provides a method to evaluate the permanence of human skintone colors, neutrals and nearneutrals, as well as a full range of the printable colors in sRGB or other color spaces over the full tonal scale found in photographs. The WIR i-Star metric can be used to evaluate changes in colors as well as changes in both localized and overall image contrast.