This article presents a method for colour measurements directly on printed half-tone multicoloured pictures. The article introduces the concept of colour impression. By this concept we mean the CMY or CMYK vector (colour vector), which lives in the three-or four-dimensional space of printing inks. Two factors contribute to values of the vector components, namely, the percentage of the area covered by cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks (tonal values) and ink densities. The colour vector expresses integrated information about the tonal values and ink densities. Values of the colour vector components increase if tonal values or ink densities rise and vice versa. If, for some primary colour, the ink density and tonal value do not change, the corresponding component of the colour vector remains constant. If some reference values of the colour vector components are set from a preprint, then, after an appropriate calibration, the colour vector directly shows how much the operator needs to raise or lower the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink densities in order to correct colours of the picture being measured. The values of the components are obtained by registering the RGB image from the measuring area and then transforming the set of registered RGB values to the triplet or quadruple of CMY or CMYK values, respectively. Algorithms based on artificial neural networks are used for performing the transformation. During the experimental investigations, we have found a good correlation between components of the colour vector and ink densities.