What is disclosed is a novel system and method for quickly and accurately determining whether a color is inside or outside the boundary of a surface of a color gamut. The present method enables a gamut mapping algorithm to quickly identify points which require further processing and those which are already inside the gamut and thus do not need to be processed by the gamut mapping function. The present method can be performed directly on the printing device to determine whether the colors are in/out of the actual gamut surface of the target marking device. Other embodiments have also been disclosed.