While there were earlier mechanical printing processes that could imitate the tone and subtle details of a photograph, most notably the Woodburytype, expense and practicality prohibited their being used in mass commercial printing that used relief printing. Ī multicolor postcard (1899) printed from hand-made halftone plates. The semi-opaque property of ink allows halftone dots of different colors to create another optical effect: full-color imagery. Just as color photography evolved with the addition of filters and film layers, color printing is made possible by repeating the halftone process for each subtractive color – most commonly using what is called the ' CMYK color model'. At a microscopic level, developed black-and-white photographic film also consists of only two colors, and not an infinite range of continuous tones. This reproduction relies on a basic optical illusion: when the halftone dots are small, the human eye interprets the patterned areas as if they were smooth tones.

Where continuous-tone imagery contains an infinite range of colors or greys, the halftone process reduces visual reproductions to an image that is printed with only one color of ink, in dots of differing size ( pulse-width modulation) or spacing ( frequency modulation) or both. 'Halftone' can also be used to refer specifically to the image that is produced by this process. Halftone is the reprographic technique that simulates continuous-tone imagery through the use of dots, varying either in size or in spacing, thus generating a gradient-like effect. Right: Example of how the human eye would see the dots from a sufficient distance.

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