Patent ID: 7545536

Claim:
An image forming apparatus, comprising: a color correcting unit including a scanning unit configured to optically scan an original document to read an image, and to output an image signal; a first converting unit configured to perform a gradation conversion on the image signal; a hue-area detecting unit configured to detect, among a plurality of hue areas having a plane provided in parallel with a brightness axis in a color space as a boundary, a hue area including a signal color represented by a color image signal; and a correction unit configured to correct the signal color according to the hue area; a reference-data storing unit configured to store reference data corresponding to a patch in a reference chart including a plurality of achromatic patches having different gradation levels and a plurality of different chromatic patches, the reference chart obtained by reading an image by the scanning unit; and a parameter generating unit configured to generate, based on the reference data, a hue division parameter to be set in the hue-area detecting unit and a color correction parameter to be set in the correction unit.