Controlling colour-printed gloss by varnish-halftones

Printing appearance effects beyond colour - such as gloss - is an active research topic in the scope of multi-layer printing ( 2.5D or 3D printing). Such techniques may enable a perceptually more accurate reproduction of optical material properties and are required to avoid appearance related artefacts sometimes observed in regular colour printing - such as bronzing and differential gloss. In addition to technical challenges of printing such effects, a perceptual space that describes the related visual attributes is crucial; particularly to define perceptually meaningful tolerances and for appearance gamut mapping. In this paper, we focus on spatially-varying gloss created by varnish-halftones. This enables us to print specular gloss effects covering a large portion of the NCS gloss scale from full matte to high gloss. We then conduct a psychophysical experiment to find the relationship between measured specular gloss and a perceptually uniform gloss scale. Our results show that this relationship can be well described by a power function according to Stevens Power Law.