METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PREPARING COLOR SEPARATIONS BASED ON N-WAY COLOR RELATIONSHIPS

A method and system for creating color separations comprising discrete computational objects whose edge contours are mutually compatible, such contours being defined based on user-selected n-way color relationships. The objects may be moved, copied, scaled, re-oriented, altered in appearance or resolution, or otherwise manipulated by a user as units. In operation, the invention analyzes a multicolored pixelmap to identify edges associated with regions of a particular color. As it traces an edge the invention generates a secondary edge whose distance from the original edge is determined by the pairwise relationship between the adjacent colors; that distance may vary as the color abutting the edge changes. The pixels along the secondary edge are stored as an order list of pixels that defines the object thus traced.