Selective screening method

A method of creating a halftone image of a color image, comprising the steps of:

• forming a digital representation of said color image, said digital representation comprising a plurality of separations;
• dividing at least one said plurality of separations into a plurality of regions;
• assigning at least one screen characteristic value to each said plurality of regions;
• providing a screen generator;
• providing image data streams to said screen generator, each said image data stream spanning at least one of said plurality of regions, said image data streams additionally comprising said at least one screen characteristic value assigned to each of said plurality of regions spanned by said data stream and a pixel count for each of said regions within said data stream;
• and
• using said provided data streams to create a halftone image of said color image.