The presently disclosed embodiment provides an interactive tool for printed image artifact characterization that successfully combines the advantages from both a human visual system and automated image quality characterization. In the interactive tool provided, the user may specify coarse level information, such as the region of interest in a print image, to be examined by the automated image-quality characterization algorithm, which can then employ sophisticated algorithms, e.g. signal processing, feature extraction, estimation and classification, to find precise fine-level descriptors.