Systems and methods of efficiently creating color separations for subsequent use in multi-stage printing processes to produce an acceptable facsimile of user-selected artwork on a substrate are disclosed. The method obtains an initial color palette ((i.e. an ordered list of a plurality of printing inks) from an electronic rendering and extracts a final color palette from the initial color palette by clustering the plurality of unique color values corresponding to the plurality of printing inks in the initial color palette into discrete color clusters. The method finds a centroid for each discrete color cluster, creates a reduced color set containing a plurality of color values within the particularly-defined color space, each color value in the reduced color set corresponding to the color value representative of each found centroid, orders the plurality of color values in the reduced color set to form the final color palette as an ordered list of a plurality of printing inks, and then produces color separation plates based on the electronic rendering and final color palette.