To print line drawings, such as company logos, on glass and ceramics, screen printers mix pigments in certain ratios for each color in the image. Each of these mixtures is then dissolved, and the image is printed on transfer material in several stages (one stage for every color). Finally, the transfer material is put on the object, which is then heated to about 800 degrees centigrade to fix the image to the object.

Color matching is the process of determining the ratios of pigments in a mixture such that it will result in a desired color. In practice, this is done by printers using their experience and trial-and-error. If, for example, a color proof is too red, reduce the amount of red pigment, and try again.

It would be very convenient if the color of a mixture of pigments could be computed from the reflectivity curves (i.e., the fraction of light that is reflected, for all wavelengths in the visible range of the spectrum) of the primary pigments. If one can do this, one can also solve the color matching problem using standard optimization techniques (e.g., a hill climber, or simulated annealing). An exact match is not alway possible; in that case, one wants to determine a color that is sufficiently close to the desired color (according to a standard color difference function).

Unfortunately, the color of a mixture is not simply the (weighted) average of the colors of the primary pigments in one of the many color models (RGB, CMYK, CIE-XYZ, CIE-Lab, ...). This is explained by Kubelka and Munk, who developed a theory for color mixing and matching in 1932. Their theory is still applied by the painting industry today.

It is unknown to what degree the Kubelka-Munk theory applies to screen printing (the fact that inks are heated to about 800 degrees centigrade may or may not have an inpact on the resulting color), and experiments have to be done to establish this.