How were photographic images reproduced in newspapers and adverts around 1929?
Asked 1/25/2015
19 views
2 answers
0
I’m looking at a 1929 advertisement and wondering how the photo-like images were actually printed at that time. What printing process was commonly used for newspapers, adverts, and similar mass-produced material in that era? I’d also appreciate key terms to research.
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
11y ago
2 Answers
61
The first photographic images printed in newspapers were actually wood engravings meticulously hand-copied from a photograph printed in the normal way. By the 1890s, however, prints were made in essentially the same way they are today: through halftoning — printing different tones as patterns of small dots varied in size and spacing. By the 1929s, this technique was relatively sophisticated, although arguably the image quality afforded by hand-engraving was still much higher, but hand-engraving also required considerable artistry and time (and therefore expense). More sophisticated ink prints could be made through photogravure, and while those were used for high-quality books, that process was also far too expensive for newspapers, advertising flyers, or cheap magazines.
Halftones were made like this: the original printed photograph was re-photographed through a glass screen with a pattern of tiny apertures, onto a film or a plate. This was then developed at very high contrast, resulting in dots which varied in size according to the intensity in the original. This, in turn, was used to make a sort of contact print on a sheet of metal using a material which would harden when exposed to light. The rest of that material was then washed away, and acid etch used to dissolve the bare areas between the dots. This resulted in a plate which was used in the printing press. (It'd be fastened to a wood block and locked into place along with the type on the page.)
If you have a higher-resolution image, or the original, look closely (zoom in, or use a magnifying glass) and the halftone dots should be readily apparent.
Here's a crop from a postcard from around 1910, clearly using a very simple single-screen halftone process:

(This image is grayscale, and wasn't scanned at high enough resolution to make it possible to convert back to pure black and white without losing detail, but if you were able to look closely at the original, you'd see that there's obviously no different tones of ink — just the black.)
A more sophisticated method involved doing this multiple times with screens of different sizes, but that didn't become common until the 1930s — after your stated time. By the 1970s, this technique was basically replaced with photo offset printing (where the whole page, text and all, is transferred to the plate photographically), and of course CMYK printing added color, but the fundamental approach of halftoning remained — and does today, although the screen is now almost always digital.
If you're interested in this kind of thing — and the development of photography as a physical art overall — I highly recommend The Printed Picture, by Richard Benson, which covers this and many other print processes from the Renaissance to now. If you're looking for more on newspaper printing in specific, searching for more about halftones, letterpress, and offset printing should get you in the right direction. Encyclopedia Britannica (still a thing!) has a nice aricle on photoengraving which covers this process as well.
Originally by user1943. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user1943
11y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
By 1929, photo images in newspapers and adverts were typically reproduced with halftone printing. Instead of printing continuous tones directly, the image was converted into patterns of tiny dots whose size and spacing created the illusion of shades of gray.
Earlier newspaper “photo” reproductions were often wood engravings hand-copied from photographs, but by the late 19th century halftone methods had become standard and were well established by the 1920s.
For newspapers, the halftone screen was usually fairly coarse—roughly 55 to 75 lines per inch—because of the paper quality and fast press printing. Magazines could use finer screens, often around 100 to 150 lpi, for better detail.
A higher-quality process called photogravure also existed, but it was generally too expensive for newspapers, flyers, and cheap magazines; it was more common in premium printed work.
Useful search terms:
- halftone printing
- newspaper halftone
- photoengraving
- crossline screen
- photogravure
- wet plate collodion
UniqueBot
AI11y ago
Your Answer
Related Questions
How were small album photo prints made around 1909?
What aspect ratio were 1960s slides meant to be, and why do some scans have black borders?
How can I get more naturally saturated landscape photos without using HDR?
Could a professional photographer in 1920s Europe enlarge prints from a Vest Pocket Kodak negative?
What 3D portrait process was used for glass portraits made in Paris around 1945?