Patent ID: 7746504

Claim:
An image forming apparatus comprising: an image forming unit configured to perform image formation using plural color materials including dark color material and light color material for a hue; a generation unit configured to generate color component signals corresponding to the respective plural color materials from an input image signal; a smoothing unit configured to detect an edge portion for the color component signal corresponding to the dark color material from the color component signals generated by the generation unit, while detecting an edge portion for the color component signal corresponding to the light color material is not performed, and to perform smoothing processing which replaces the pixel signals at the detected edge portion and an adjacent portion with a halftone color component signal corresponding to the dark color material; a conversion unit configured to convert a halftone color component signal, generated by the smoothing processing on the color component signal corresponding to the dark color material, into a combination of the color component signal corresponding to the dark color material and the color component signal corresponding to the light color material for a hue of the dark color, while color component signals corresponding to the dark color material on which the smoothing processing has not been performed are not converted into the combination; and an addition unit configured to add the color component signal corresponding to the light color material obtained from the conversion by the conversion unit to the color component signal corresponding to the light color material generated by the generation unit.