What is disclosed is a novel system and method for calculating an amount of a total dilation for reverse objects in order to compensate for fill-in effects to improve quality of a digital image in a digital document reproduction system. In a manner more fully described herein, a tone-dependent compensation factor is determined which is a function of a gamma-corrected background density. The tone-dependent compensation factor is then used to scale the maximum base dilation to produce an amount of total dilation. The total dilation amount is applied to contone pixels along an edge of the reverse object to compensate for fill-in artifact effects. By adjusting pixels along the edges of reverse objects by the total dilation determined hereby, the sharpness (or crispness) of reverse fine features is improved on sweeps and for hue shifts at the edges of the reverse objects on backgrounds of more than one color separation.