A printing control method of generating print data to be supplied to a print unit capable of forming dots on a print medium by ejecting ink droplets of at least one type of colored ink containing a color material and a quality-enhancing ink for enhancing quality of a printed material. The printing control method comprises a tone-decreasing step which includes the step of generating transparent dot data by a process configured such that size of first processing-targeted pixels is larger than size of second processing-targeted pixels, the first processing-targeted pixels being targeted for processing in the transparent dot data generating process, the second processing-targeted pixels being targeted for processing in the colored dot data generating process.