I wondered if anyone could explain to me in simple terms how to tell a real lithograph from a print? Firstly, What Is A Lithograph and is it a Print?Ī Lithograph is technically a print. When I learned that Lithography was a form of printing I wondered if any of the lithographs that I had purchased were ‘real’. When I started collecting prints I kept coming across Lithographs for sale and was not sure what they actually were. A hand made original will have uneven sized dots that can be thicker in height to make up the image. If you look at the image with a magnifying glass and see even sized dots which are also quite flat then you’re most likely looking at a mechanical print. In a mechanical print tiny even sized dots of cyan, yellow, magenta & black are used to make the image. Under magnification you can see irregularities the way the lines are made and how colors are applied.
This requires some magnification of the image because a lithographic ‘plate’ which is used to create the printed image is usually hand-made by an artist. The answer to the question “how to tell a real lithograph from a print?” assumes you mean a mechanical print versus an artists’ hand-made lithograph print.
