Printing is the process for reproducing text and images using a master form or template. The earliest examples include Cylinder seals and other objects such as the clay Cylinder of Nabonidus from ancient Babylonia. The earliest known form of woodblock printing came from China dating to before 220 A.D. Block printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia both as a method of printing on textiles and later, under the influence of Buddhism, on paper. A later development in printing was the concept of movable type, first developed by Bi Sheng in China. 

Cylinder of Nabonidus 540 B.C. from the temple of Sin in Ur

The first invention of a movable type mechanical printing technology in Europe is credited to the German printer Johannes Gutenberg in 1450. Gutenberg, a goldsmith by profession, developed a printing system by both adapting existing technologies and making inventions of his own. His newly devised hand mould made possible the rapid creation of metal movable type in large quantities. The printing press displaced earlier methods of printing and led to the first assembly line-style mass production of books. A single Renaissance printing press could produce 3,600 pages per workday, compared to about 2,000 by typographic block-printing and a few by hand-copying. Books of bestselling authors such as Luther and Erasmus were sold by the hundreds of thousands in their lifetime. Printing soon spread from Mainz, Germany to over two hundred cities in a dozen European countries. By 1500, printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced more than twenty million volumes.  The importance of printing as an emblem of modern achievement and of the ability of so-called Moderns to rival the Ancients, in whose teachings much of Renaissance learning was grounded, was enhanced by the frequent juxtaposition of the recent invention of printing to those of the lens and the nautical compass. In 1620, the English philosopher Francis Bacon indeed wrote that these three inventions "changed the whole face and state of the world". In Renaissance Europe, the arrival of mechanical movable type printing introduced the era of mass communication which permanently altered the structure of society. The relatively unrestricted circulation of information and (revolutionary) ideas transcended borders, captured the masses in the Reformation and threatened the power of political and religious authorities; the sharp increase in literacy broke the monopoly of the literate elite on education and learning and bolstered the emerging middle class.

CMYK and Offset Printing

Offset Printing is one of the most common ways of creating printed matter. A few of its common applications include: newspapers, magazines, brochures, stationery, and books.  Compared to other printing methods, offset printing is best suited for economically producing large volumes of high quality prints in a manner that requires little maintenance.

Subtractive Color

The CMYK color model is a subtractive color model, used in color printing, and is also used to describe the printing process itself. CMYK refers to the four inks used in some color printing: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (black). The "K" in CMYK stands for key because in four-color printing, cyan, magenta, and yellow printing plates are carefully keyed, or aligned, with the key of the black key plate.  The CMYK model works by partially or entirely masking colors on a lighter, usually white, background. The ink reduces the light that would otherwise be reflected. Such a model is called subtractive because inks "subtract" brightness from white.

Additive Color

Cathode Ray Tube from an old T.V.

In additive color models such as RGB which is used for T.V.'s and computer monitors, white is the "additive" combination of all primary colored lights, while black is the absence of light. In the CMYK model, it is the opposite: white is the natural color of the paper or other background, while black results from a full combination of colored inks. To save money on ink, and to produce deeper black tones, unsaturated and dark colors are produced by using black ink instead of the combination of cyan, magenta and yellow.

Nicéphore Niépce was a French inventor, credited as the inventor of photography and a pioneer in that field. Niépce developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world's oldest surviving product of a photographic process: a print made from a photoengraved printing plate in 1825. In 1826 he used a primitive camera to produce the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene. 

In 1826  Niépce photographed a view from the back window of his house, on a sheet of bitumen-coated pewter. The result has survived and is now the oldest known camera photograph still in existence.

Early Photographs were often printed on tin and other metalic surfaces

Portrait of Geronimo 1887

Early negatives were created by hand painting emulsion onto glass plates, then exposing them to light.