Multilevel density compensation for digital printing machines

A method corrects color density unevenness during a printing operation on an inkjet printing machine having printing nozzles and a computer. The computer modifies the number or size of the drops to be applied to a printing substrate to attain nominal color density values after the processing of a rasterized print image. For different actual tone values, it is determined which target tone value is required to attain a nominal coloration by measuring a test image for every printing nozzle using a color measurement device, and, based thereon, an area coverage-dependent compensation profile is determined and saved on the computer to be applied in the printing operation to calculate the number and size of the drops on the computer.