Registration is a term used in the printing and desktop publishing industry. It is the method of correlating color separations.
Definition
Registration is printing specific extra marks so that different artwork can be aligned. These are known as Registration Marks in Desktop Publishing.
Purpose
Registration is to help align different colours to form a continuous tone image. Different printing devices have different methods of creating color. Often this requires a pass to create one colour component, and then another pass to create more. Combined these should create the optical illusion of colour. But by splitting the colour creation into many discrete passes the process becomes prone to error. These errors can mean that the optical illusion is broken and that the discrete colours become visible. One method of reducing and quantifying error is Registration
