Inkjet recording apparatus

An inkjet recording apparatus, comprising:

• a head which ejects ink droplets of light-curable ink to a print medium to form an image on the print medium;
• a light irradiating device which irradiates light from a light source onto the ink droplets immediately after the ink droplets have been deposited on the print medium;
• and
• a control device which controls the light irradiating device in such a manner that luminous energy irradiated onto a region of the print medium where bleeding of the ink droplets would be conspicuous is greater than luminous energy irradiated onto another region of the print medium,
• wherein the region of the print medium where the bleeding of the ink droplets would be conspicuous is at least one of an edge of a solid print region in the image, an edge of a line region in the image, an isolated dot in the image, a region of high contrast in the image, and a region of large color variation in the image, and
• a region of high contrast in the image, and a region of large color variation in the image are determined by calculating values for concentration difference and color difference between adjacent pixels of image data, to obtain regions corresponding to large absolute values.

An inkjet recording method, comprising:

• ejecting ink droplets of light-curable ink to a print medium to form an image on the print medium;
• irradiating light from a light source onto the ink droplets immediately after the ink droplets have been deposited on the print medium;
• and
• controlling the irradiating step so that luminous energy irradiated onto a region of the print medium including the ink droplets where bleeding of the ink droplets would be conspicuous is greater than luminous energy irradiated onto another region of the print medium including the ink droplets where bleeding of the ink droplets would be inconspicuous,
• wherein the region of the print medium where the bleeding of the ink droplets would be conspicuous is at least one of an edge of a solid print region in the image, an edge of a line region in the image, an isolated dot in the image, a region of high contrast in the image, and a region of large color variation in the image, and
• a region of high contrast in the image, and a region of large color variation in the image are determined by multiplying two-dimensional image data by an edge detection matrix.