A method for determining a tonal vector for generating a control signal for a printing device, a computer program product and a printing system

The invention relates to a method for determining a tonal vector for generating a control signal for a printing device, a computer program product and a printing system, wherein the method comprising:• providing a device-independent color value vector (CV),• transforming the device-independent color value vector (CV) into the tonal vector (TV) using a backward transformation (BT),characterized in that the method further comprises the steps of determining the backward transformation (BT) such that a cost function comprising an image difference metric term is minimized, wherein the image difference metric term represents a difference between a reference image (RI) comprising device-independent color value vectors (CV) and a simulated image (SI), wherein the simulated image (SI) is determined by transforming an input image (II) into a tonal image using the backward transformation (BT) and transforming the tonal image into the simulated image (SI) by using a forward transformation (FT).