Color separation is currently used to decide how much of each available colorant to use for each printable color and halftoning then builds patterns that meet those choices. Print color, however, depends not only on how much of each colorant is used, but also on how those colorants are superimposed. Furthermore, there are many halftone patterns that correspond to a given combination of ink amounts. HANS (Halftone Area Neugebauer Separation), which we introduced at last year's IS&T's CIC conference, is a move towards specifying halftone pattern statistics and enables control over print properties beyond their current limits. While the benefits of HANS for color gamut and ink use efficiency have been shown, at this year's NIP, we would like to look more closely at how to determine the set of all possible halftone patterns that match a given color and demonstrate how access to such sets – metamer sets – benefits print control. We will also illustrate how even for a simple CMY ink set, which using current approaches leads to exactly one ink combination per printable color, there are sets of alternative halftone patterns that match a given color. Such sets in turn allow for tradeoffs to be made, e.g., between grain and ink use, even in this simple case.
Ján Morovič, Peter Morovič, Juan M. García-Reyero, "HANS – Unlocking New Print Control Alternatives By Bringing Color Separation And Halftoning Closer Together" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies and Digital Fabrication (NIP27), 2011, pp 38 - 40, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2011.27.1.art00012_1