Color printing

British art historian Michael Sullivan writes that "the earliest color printing known in China, and indeed in the whole world, is a two-color frontispiece to a Buddhist sutra scroll, dated 1346".

[1] In Chinese woodblock printing, early color woodcuts mostly occur in luxury books about art, especially the more prestigious medium of painting.

Notable examples are Ming-era Chinese painter Hu Zhengyan's Treatise on the Paintings and Writings of the Ten Bamboo Studio of 1633, and the Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden published in 1679 and 1701, and printed in five colors.

The "full-color" technique, called nishiki-e in its fully developed form, spread rapidly, and was used widely for sheet prints from the 1760s on.

This was the method developed in Germany; in Italy only tone blocks were often used, to create an effect more like a wash drawing.

Jacob Christoph Le Blon developed a method using three intaglio plates, usually in mezzotint; these were overprinted to achieve a wide range of colors.

In the 19th century a number of different methods of color printing, using woodcut (technically Chromoxylography) and other methods, were developed in Europe, which for the first time achieved widespread commercial success, so that by the later decades the average home might contain many examples, both hanging as prints and as book illustrations.

English Artists such as Randolph Caldecott, Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway were influenced by the Japanese prints now available and fashionable in Europe to create a suitable style, with flat areas of color.

Zincography, with zinc plates, later replaced lithographic stones, and remained the most common method of color printing until the 1930s.

Where two inks overlap on the paper due to sequential printing impressions, a primary color is perceived.

The secondary or subtractive colors cyan, magenta and yellow may be considered "primary" by printers and watercolorists (whose basic inks and paints are transparent).

In the "pre-press" stage, original images are translated into forms that can be used on a printing press, through "color separation" and "screening" or "halftoning".

[3] The digital inkjet printers such as EPSON SureColor series has been using this method successfully to reproduce 99% Pantone colors.

This includes cleaning up the file to make it print ready and creating a proof for the prepress approval process.

Today's digital printing methods do not have the restriction of a single color space that traditional CMYK processes do.

The screen grids are set at different angles, and the dots therefore create tiny rosettes, which, through a kind of optical illusion, appear to form a continuous-tone image.

Traditionally, halftone screens were generated by inked lines on two sheets of glass that were cemented together at right angles.

Most recently, computer to plate (CTP) technology has allowed printers to bypass the film portion of the process entirely.

CTP images the dots directly on the printing plate with a laser, saving money, and eliminating the film step.

The amount of generation loss in printing a lithographic negative onto a lithographic plate, unless the processing procedures are completely ignored, is almost completely negligible, as there are no losses of dynamic range, no density gradations, nor are there any colored dyes, or large silver grains to contend with in an ultra-slow rapid access negative.