Contactless fingerprint identification has emerged as a reliable and user-friendly alternative for personal identification in a range of mobile and access control applications. This paper presents a systematic analysis of the extent of complimentary ridge-valley information in contactless fingerprint images and introduces a new approach to achieve significantly higher match accuracy over state-of-the-art fingerprint matchers commonly employed today. We also investigate the least explored methods for fingerprint color-space conversions, which can play a key role in more accurate contactless fingerprint matching from mobile sensors. We present the experimental results from different publicly available contactless fingerprint databases and incorporate the NBIS, MCC, and a commercial fingerprint matcher to ascertain the extent of performance enhancement. Our consistently outperforming results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for more accurate contactless fingerprint identification.