London Lithographic Printing Services

Originally, lithography involved etching images onto actual pieces of limestone or wax blocks, but these days the technology is quite different.

Today, lithography is a process by which the image to be printed is chemically transferred to a thin metal plate. When ink is applied, the areas which are not to be printed repel the ink, and the plate, by means of a number of rollers, eventually transfers the ink to the paper.

A typical litho printing machine can print up to four different colours at the same time (usually the CMYK or process colours) although there are machines that can handle eight colours at a time, meaning that is it possible to print jobs that contain both 4 colour process and spot colours, in just one pass of the paper.

Lithography is fast, efficient, and extremely cost-effective, and is the most common printing process in use worldwide today. At Michael Egan Associates, we use litho for the vast majority of our work, and once a job has been completed, the plates are then stored in our plate library, so that when a repeat order comes in, those plates can then be retrieved and placed back on machine.