A spectral-based 8-ink characterization model is developed to accurately predict the recipe for a multi-ink printer. The 8-ink color separation method is a union of five 3-ink and six 4-ink combinations based on the cellular Yule-Nielsen spectral Neugebauer model with a recipe selection strategy. The performance levels of the forward and backward models are evaluated for individual ink combinations using printed testing samples. Furthermore, the spectral-based method performs better compared with the XYZ-based approach. On the basis of the backward model performance, a novel fast recipe selection strategy is proposed and estimated.