An image forming apparatus includes a liquid discharge device and processing circuitry. The liquid discharge device includes at least one nozzle group, where N represents an integer, to discharge liquid. The processing circuitry causes the first nozzle group to discharge in a first scan, causes the second nozzle group to discharge in a second scan, and causes the N-th nozzle group to discharge in an N-th scan to form a complete image. The processing circuitry, with respect to an image completion rate indicating a rate of an image formed by each of the first nozzle group to the N-th nozzle group in the complete image, sets the image completion rate of a portion of the first nozzle group adjacent to the second nozzle group in the sub-scanning direction to be not higher than the image completion rate of any one of the second nozzle group to the N-th nozzle group.