Removal or mitigation of artifacts in composite-color incremental printing

Abstract

One aspect of the invention lowers boundary artifacts by diminishing inking selectively at a boundary, only in high-total-inking areas—considering essentially all real colorant planes in the aggregate. In another aspect, printmasking helps define ink-diminishment regions. In yet another, a printer allocates inking-diminishment units within an emulation of a masking plane (e.g. a color plane), analogously to allocation of inking units in real color planes. The entire diminishment plane or “eraser plane”, however, is later applied subtractively. Localized diminishment bits can be set in the mask at pixels close to boundaries, to define diminishment regions that negate artifact-causing boundary coalescence specifically—or such bits can be generated adaptively from results of measuring nonuniformity in an area-fill test pattern.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.