Systems and methods are described that facilitate reducing a number of patches used in characterizing a color halftone printer via a binary color printer model. A binary printer model involves printing of a fundamental set of color binary patterns that encompass all possible halftone outputs. A k-center clustering technique is employed to automatically find and eliminate redundancies in the initial set of binary color patterns. Once the number of patches is reduced to an acceptable number, a multiplicative reflectance model is applied that better approximates the physical process and therefore improves accuracy.