Yule-Nielsen effect in halftone prints: graphical analysis method and improvement of the Yule-Nielsen transform

The well-known Yule-Nielsen modified spectral Neugebauer model is one of the most accurate predictive models for the spectral reflectance of printed halftone colors which expresses the spectral reflectance of halftones raised to the power 1/n as a linear combination of the spectral reflectance of the fulltone colors (Neugebauer primaries) also raised to the power 1/n, where n is a tunable real number. The power 1/n transform, characteristic of the Yule-Nielsen transform, empirically models the nonlinear relationship between the spectral reflectances of halftones and fulltones due to the internal propagation of light by scattering into the printing support, a phenomenon known as “optical dot gain” or “YuleNielsen effect”. In this paper, we propose a graphical method permitting to observe this non-linear relationship in the case of single-ink halftones and to experimentally check the capacity of the Yule-Nielsen model to predict it accurately. In the case where the Yule-Nielsen transform is not well adapted to the considered type of prints, we propose alternative transforms in order to improve the prediction accuracy.