The present article will introduce a tier), simple new method for spectral-based color separation. This method inverts a Yule-Nielsen modified spectral Neugebauer model, utilizing its affine multilinearity in the 1/n-space. By means of linear regression, a sequence of colorant combinations is constructed converging to a colorant combination that approximates the desired reflectance spectrum in the sense of the smallest RMS error. Each iteration step consists mainly of two simple matrix-vector multiplications. With the aid of various simulation experiments, investigations on the speed of convergence are conducted. (C) 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.