Chromolithography

Chromolithography is a color-printing method that uses separate lithographic stones or plates to print successive colors, often with precise registration.

Lithography: A printing process based on the resistance between water and oil-based ink on a flat surface. Chromolithography extends this flat-surface process by assigning different colors to separate impressions.
Alois Senefelder: German playwright and inventor who developed lithography around the turn of the nineteenth century. His invention supplied the printing process later adapted for multiple colors.
Advertising poster: A printed notice designed to promote a product, service, event, or cause. Chromolithography enabled eye-catching color posters before modern color offset printing.
Photolithography: A lithographic process that uses photographic images or masks to transfer patterns to a surface. Despite the similar name, photolithography is not the traditional multicolor print method.
Currier and Ives: An American printmaking firm known for publishing popular illustrated prints in the nineteenth century. Its mass-market prints helped make color lithographs familiar in American homes.
Registration (printing): The alignment of successive printing impressions so their images and colors fall in the intended positions. Misregistration between color impressions creates visible shifts, gaps, or fringes.
Lithographic limestone: Fine-grained limestone suitable for drawing and printing by lithography. Its even surface made it a traditional support for the separate color images.
Cigarette card: A small printed card distributed with cigarette packages, often featuring an illustrated subject. Chromolithographed cards turned inexpensive packaging inserts into collectible color images.
Halftone: A printing technique that represents continuous tones as patterns of dots varying in size or spacing. Halftone screens reproduce tonal images differently from chromolithography's separately drawn color areas.
Louis Prang: A Prussian-born American printer and publisher associated with chromolithographic prints and greeting cards. His firm produced widely circulated color prints and helped popularize Christmas cards in the United States.

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