Characterization of total dot gain gives a good insight to the study of paper and print. In this article, we propose three approaches based on the Murray–Davies model to obtain total dot gain. In the first approach, the total gain is approximated by minimizing the root-mean-square between the calculated spectrum and the reflected spectrum measured by the spectrophotometer. The other two approaches are based on microscale images captured by a high resolution camera. These two approaches differ in their schemes on how to obtain the gray tone of the full-tone ink. By the use of microscale images, the authors also illustrate the shape of the effective dot area for the investigated paper substrate. They also study the histograms of the reflected and transmitted microscale images. This comparison shows that although the transmitted image has less optical dot gain compared to the reflected image, the transmittance also incorporates some small amount of optical dot gain.