Abstract In many practical applications, printed images or text are exposed to a light source, making their lightfastness an important characteristic. Good lightfastness assures good color stability after prolonged use. In this study an accelerated aging procedure using a xenon arc lamp was applied to induce and investigate the degradation of Altona test chart color images and patches of offset and electrophotographic prints on papers made of virgin and 100% recycled fibers. In this article the authors present a new image processing method based on chrominance histogram quantification and discuss its applicability and performance with respect to the conventional spectrophotometric approach. The chrominance histogram quantification method using printed images proves to be a viable alternative to the established spectrophotometric measurements that are implemented on color patches and yield 2D color gamut information.