IMAGE FORMING APPARATUS AND IMAGE FORMING METHOD

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To suppress deterioration of members involved in image formation and to suppress deterioration in image quality due to decrease of transfer rate of toner even when a sheet having a low surface smoothness is used.SOLUTION: An image forming apparatus 100 comprises a sheet conveyance part 206, an image forming part 110 and a control part 200. The image forming part 110 includes a transfer part 207 which performs transfer processing in which a toner image is transferred to a sheet, and a fixing unit 70 which performs fixing processing in which the sheet is heated and pressed. Under a prescribed condition, the control part 200 performs smoothing processing in which the fixing processing is performed on a sheet without performing the transfer processing. When the control part 200 performs smoothing processing, it stops or slows down at least one operation among the operations of the sheet conveyance part 206 and the image forming part 110 in the case of forming an image on a sheet, with the exception of the fixing processing.