Simple comparison of spectral color reproduction workflows

Abstract

In this article we compare two workflows for spectral color reproduction : colorant separation (CS) followed by halftoning by scalar error diffusion (SED) of its resulting multi-colorant channel image and a second workflow by spectral vector error diffusion (sVED). Identical filters are used in both SED and sVED to diffuse the error. Gamut mapping is performed as pre-processing and the reproductions are compared to the gamut mapped spectral data. The inverse spectral Yule-Nielsen modified Neugebauer (YNSN) model is used for the colorant separation. To bring the improvement of the YNSN model upon the regular Neugebauer model into the sVED halftoning the n factor is introduced in the sVED halftoning. The performances of both workflows are evaluated in term of spectral and color differences but also visually with the dot distributions obtained by the two halftoning techniques. Experimental results have shown close performances for the compared workflows in term of color and spectral differences but visually cleaner and more stable dot distributions obtained by sVED. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.