Intaglio Printing and Banknote Engraving: How the Raised-Ink Portrait Is Made
Intaglio presses at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing weigh 57 tons and print with up to 20 tons of pressure, and the sheets they produce sit in a vault for three days to dry before the other side is printed (Bureau of Engraving and Printing). That pressure is what lifts ink out of an engraved steel plate and leaves a ridge you can feel with a fingertip.
Up to 20 tons of press pressureThree days of drying per sideFeels like fine sandpaper when dryUsed on Australian notes since 1913
Last updated: September 2026
Intaglio printing cuts the image into a steel plate instead of raising it on the surface. Ink fills the engraved recesses, the plate face is wiped clean, and paper is pressed into the grooves under enormous force, pulling the ink out onto the sheet. The result is a raised image you can feel, which the Bureau of Engraving and Printing describes as feeling like fine sandpaper.
What is intaglio printing on a banknote?
Intaglio is printing from below the surface. The design is cut into a metal plate, ink is worked into those cuts, the flat face of the plate is wiped bare, and the sheet is forced down into the engraving. Everything that ends up on the note came out of a groove, which is why the ink stands proud of the paper rather than sitting flat on it.
The Bureau of Engraving and Printing sets out the sequence precisely: ink is applied to the engraved plate, the excess is removed from the non-image areas so that ink remains only in the recessed areas, paper is laid on top, and the two are pressed together under great pressure, pulling the ink from the recesses onto the paper to create a slightly raised finished image. The Bureau also names what intaglio carries on a United States note: the portraits, vignettes, scrollwork, numerals and lettering unique to each denomination.
The word comes from the Italian for carving or cutting in, and the technique long predates money. What banknotes added is scale, repeatability and force. A fine-art etching is printed a few hundred times from a copper plate. A currency plate has to deliver identical detail across a run of millions from chrome-plated steel without the finest lines closing up. Our overview of how banknotes are printed places intaglio among the other passes; this page follows it down to the burin.
How is a banknote portrait engraved?
By cutting the image into soft steel by hand, line by line, with a burin. There is no continuous tone anywhere on an engraved portrait. Every gradation is built from lines and dots that vary in width, depth and spacing, so the engraver is converting a photograph into a code of marks that will read as a face at arm's length.
The design comes first
The Bureau of Engraving and Printing describes the order of work: the design starts with ideas and rough sketches from banknote designers, who develop the overall look, layout and artistic details, and who then work closely with engravers to cut the portrait on the front, the vignette on the back, the ornamentation and the lettering. Each engraving, the Bureau notes, consists of numerous detailed fine lines, dots and dashes that vary in size and shape. Our guide to how a banknote is designed covers the stage before the engraver picks up a tool.
The engraver's problem
A portrait engraver has to solve three things at once. The likeness has to survive being reduced to line. The line work has to be dense enough that a scanner cannot resolve it cleanly. And the whole plate has to hold together when inked, wiped and pressed under tons of force thousands of times over. Master engravers were treated accordingly. The Bank of Canada Museum calls George Gundersen's 1950s portrait of Queen Elizabeth II a beautiful reproduction of a Yousuf Karsh photograph, and records that his highly detailed engraving of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet performing a scene from Swan Lake would have been the first time recognisable human faces appeared on the back of a Bank of Canada note (Bank of Canada Museum).
Corrections are engraving too
One of the best documented cases of engraving as craft is a repair. Gundersen's Queen Elizabeth II portrait for the 1954 Canadian Landscape series was cut from a Karsh photograph after a retoucher removed the small tiara she wore. In the finished note, some people claimed to see a face in the hair above the Queen's ear, and the portrait became known as the Devil's Head. The Bank of Canada Museum records that the engraver Yves Baril darkened the highlights in the Gundersen engraving, and that after 1957 the series was free of the effect (Bank of Canada Museum). Darkening a highlight on a steel die means adding lines, by hand, without disturbing the ones already there.
How does one engraved die become a printing plate?
The original engraving is a single small die. It is never used to print. Instead the image is transferred under pressure onto a soft roll, and from that roll onto a working plate, as many times as the sheet layout requires. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing describes the engravings as being cut into steel dies that are transferred and processed to create working printing plates.
That transfer step, historically called siderography, is what made banknote printing an industry. A single engraver's die can be repeated 32 or 50 times on one plate without any of the copies drifting from the original. It also means the master die outlives the plates. Plates wear, are scrapped and are remade from the die, so a design can run for decades with no loss of detail.
The Bureau adds the finishing steps: after careful inspection and minor repair if needed, the plates are cleaned and polished, then chrome-plated for hardness before going on the press. Chrome matters because the wiping cylinder scrapes across the plate face on every impression. Bare steel would polish away, taking the shallowest lines with it.
Sheet layout has changed inside living memory. The Bureau's own history records that the 1929 reduction in note size let it move from eight to 12 notes per sheet (Bureau of Engraving and Printing history), and today it prints 32 or 50 notes per sheet, having introduced 50-subject sheets in February 2014. Our reference on banknote sizes around the world follows that size change and what it did to the notes themselves.
What happens on an intaglio press?
Ink is forced into the engraving, the plate face is wiped, the sheet meets the plate under up to 20 tons of pressure, and the paper is physically pushed down into the grooves. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing's intaglio presses each weigh 57 tons, run at up to 10,000 sheets per hour and print 32 or 50 notes per sheet.
Two details separate intaglio from every other press in the building. The first is the wipe. Ink has to be completely removed from the flat areas and completely retained in the recesses, in the same motion, thousands of times an hour. Get it wrong in one direction and the note is muddy. Get it wrong in the other and the fine lines starve. The second is drying time. The Bureau prints the backs of currency sheets in green ink first, sends them to a vault to dry for three days, then prints the faces in black and dries them for another three days. A common work-in-process vault, it notes, might hold 50 to 100 million dollars in notes at any one time.
Order matters as much as pressure. Intaglio goes down after the offset background because it has to sit visually and physically above it, and before the serial numbers because no one wants to run a numbered sheet back through a high-pressure press. The full running order is set out in our guide to how banknotes are printed.
The Bureau of Engraving and Printing describes the finished intaglio surface in one memorable phrase: when dried, the tactility feels like fine sandpaper. That is the single best description of what a genuine engraved note should feel like under a fingertip, and it is the reason experienced dealers handle a note before they look at it.
Who are the master engravers behind famous banknotes?
Most banknote engravers work anonymously, because printing works rarely credit individuals on the note itself. Where a central bank museum has documented the attributions, the names turn out to belong to a very small group of specialists who cut a whole country's money across decades. The Bank of Canada Museum has published several of them by name.
| Engraver | Employer | Documented years | Notes engraved |
|---|---|---|---|
| George Gundersen | British American Bank Note Company, where he was engraver and art director | Early 1950s through the 1970s | The Queen Elizabeth II portrait for the 1954 Canadian Landscape series, cut from a Yousuf Karsh photograph and later known as the Devil's Head; three of the five portraits of the 1969 to 1976 Scenes of Canada series; the 1972 five dollar salmon-boat vignette; a highly detailed Royal Winnipeg Ballet vignette of a scene from Swan Lake |
| Yves Baril | Canadian Bank Note Company | A twenty-year veteran by the mid-1970s; retired in 1996 | Darkened the highlights in the Gundersen portrait so that the 1954 series was clear of the effect after 1957; took the Royal Canadian Mounted Police vignette for the 1975 fifty dollar note, first as a multi-plate colour intaglio experiment of his own devising and then as the five-plate lithographic version actually issued; prepared three bird images and hand-engraved the Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Sir Robert Borden portraits for the 1986 Birds of Canada series |
| C. Gordon Yorke | Bank note engraver; the museum records the attributions without naming his employer | Early 1970s | The 1975 two dollar vignette of the hunter Joseph Idlout, worked up from a photograph taken on Baffin Island around 1951 by the documentary filmmaker Doug Wilkinson; final preparations on the 1972 five dollar salmon-boat vignette engraved by Gundersen |
Baril's career is the clearest picture anyone has of what happened to the profession. The Bank of Canada Museum records that his ambition on the 1975 fifty dollar note was to produce a full-colour intaglio vignette by engraving several plates, each carrying one aspect of the image, and printing them one on top of another. It worked, and the results were beautiful, but the process was judged too laborious and expensive to be practical. Baril then proposed the same layered approach using five lithographic plates instead, and that version became the signature feature of one of Canada's most popular notes (Bank of Canada Museum). The museum's verdict is that the 1975 fifty heralded the end of the traditionally engraved vignette, and that Baril became the bridge between the old school of banknote printing and what came after.
Engravers also worked from other people's photographs, which is why attribution needs care. The vignette on the 1975 two dollar note came from a photograph Doug Wilkinson took on Baffin Island around 1951 while living with the Inuit hunting community he was documenting, and it was C. Gordon Yorke who turned that image into a banknote engraving (Bank of Canada Museum). The photographer, the engraver and the subject are three different credits, and collectors routinely collapse them into one. Our guide to portraits on banknotes looks at how the subjects get chosen in the first place.
How do you use intaglio as an authentication check?
Run a fingertip or a fingernail across the areas that should be engraved and feel for a ridge. Central banks teach this test themselves because it is fast, needs no equipment and tests a stage of production that is genuinely hard to imitate. Which areas are engraved differs by issuer, so knowing where to feel matters as much as feeling.
- Australia. The Reserve Bank of Australia states that intaglio gives the banknote a distinctive texture and that the slightly raised print can be felt by running a finger across the portraits and numerals (Reserve Bank of Australia).
- United Kingdom. The Bank of England tells holders they can feel raised print on the words Bank of England and over the smaller window in the bottom right corner of the polymer 20 pound note (Bank of England).
- Switzerland. The Swiss National Bank goes further and publishes a rub test alongside the feel test: run your fingers over the hand motif or the denomination to feel the raised print, then rub it onto a piece of light-coloured paper, where it will leave traces of colour (Swiss National Bank).
Two cautions apply. A heavily circulated note can wear almost smooth, so a flat-feeling note is a reason to look harder rather than a verdict on its own. And not every note has engraving to find. Many emergency and crisis issues were printed by offset or letterpress only, and a great deal of nineteenth-century paper used intaglio for the design and letterpress for the numbers and nothing else. Our guide on how to spot a counterfeit banknote puts the feel test in sequence with the others, and banknote security features explains what should accompany it.
Is banknote engraving still done by hand?
Partly. The intaglio press has not changed in principle, but the way plates are made has. The Reserve Bank of Australia puts it bluntly: intaglio plates used to be hand-engraved, and now they are grown using a chemical bath and computer technology. The hand-cut master die survives where an issuer wants the particular quality of a human engraving on a portrait.
The Bureau of Engraving and Printing describes its own engravers as working with a combination of traditional and modern techniques, bringing the portrait to life with an array of traditional tools and cutting-edge digital technology. Both statements describe the same hybrid: digital origination for ornament, guilloche and lettering, where mathematical precision is the point, and human judgement where a face has to look alive.
The length of the tradition is worth noting. The Reserve Bank of Australia records that intaglio printing has long been used on Australian banknotes, including the first Australian ten shilling banknote printed in 1913, and Australia now applies intaglio to polymer rather than paper, describing the raised printing and its accompanying microprint as a single stage of the production line (Reserve Bank of Australia, banknote production). A technique from the age of copperplate is still being applied to plastic film.
What does intaglio mean for collectors?
Intaglio quality is one of the things graders are actually judging when they talk about eye appeal. Ink film and press pressure drift across a run, so an early impression from a fresh plate has crisper line endings and a stronger ridge than a late one, and that difference survives into the graded note.
Three practical points follow. First, handle before you judge: a genuine engraved note has texture in predictable places, and learning where they are for a given issuer is faster than memorising security features. Second, treat the surface as fragile in one specific way. Intaglio relief can be flattened by pressure, which is one reason pressed and flattened notes are penalised and why our guide to storing banknotes insists on flat, loose, inert holders rather than anything that clamps. Third, remember that engraving is the reason some categories exist at all: specimen notes are genuine intaglio printings that differ only in what happened at the numbering stage.
Once you can feel the difference between an engraved portrait and a flat one, a lot of the library reads differently. Continue with banknote paper for the material the ink is pressed into, graded versus raw banknotes for how condition is judged, or browse certified graded banknotes when you want an example in hand.
Planet Banknote is a family-owned dealership in Sarasota, Florida, founded in 2021. Every note is sourced direct from mints, central banks, and authorized distributors, inspected through our Planet Banknote Verified process, and ships with a free Certificate of Authenticity. US orders ship free via USPS Priority, and every order includes a free bonus gift.
Frequently asked questions
What is intaglio printing?
Intaglio is printing from an image cut into a plate rather than raised on it. Ink is worked into the engraved recesses, the flat face of the plate is wiped clean, and paper is pressed into the grooves under great pressure so the ink is pulled out onto the sheet. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing uses it for the portraits, vignettes, scrollwork, numerals and lettering on United States currency.
Why is the ink raised on a banknote?
Because the ink comes out of a groove rather than sitting on a flat surface. Intaglio presses at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing apply up to 20 tons of pressure, which drives the paper down into the engraving and lifts the ink out with it. The ink then stands above the paper as a physical ridge. When it has dried, the Bureau says the surface feels like fine sandpaper.
How much work goes into engraving a banknote portrait?
Long enough that the plate, not the press, sets the schedule. There is no continuous tone in an engraving, so every gradation has to be built from individual marks cut into steel by hand. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing describes each engraving as consisting of numerous detailed fine lines, dots and dashes that vary in size and shape, and says the engraver brings the portrait to life with an array of traditional tools and digital technology.
Who engraves banknotes?
Specialist engravers employed by security printers, most of whom are never credited on the note. Where attributions have been published, they belong to a small group. The Bank of Canada Museum names George Gundersen of the British American Bank Note Company, who engraved the Queen Elizabeth II portrait for the 1954 series, and Yves Baril of the Canadian Bank Note Company, who retired in 1996 after engraving the 1975 fifty dollar vignette and the Birds of Canada portraits.
How can you tell if a banknote has real intaglio printing?
Run a fingertip across the areas that should be engraved and feel for a ridge. The Reserve Bank of Australia tells holders to feel across the portraits and numerals, the Bank of England points to the words Bank of England and the area over the smaller window, and the Swiss National Bank adds a rub test in which the raised print leaves traces of colour on light paper. A heavily circulated note can wear smooth, so a flat feel calls for more checking rather than a verdict.
Is banknote engraving still done by hand?
Partly. The Reserve Bank of Australia states that intaglio plates used to be hand-engraved and are now grown using a chemical bath and computer technology. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing describes its engravers as working with a combination of traditional tools and digital technology. In practice, ornament and lettering are usually originated digitally while portraits often still begin as a hand-cut master die.
Do polymer banknotes have intaglio printing?
Yes. Polymer notes take intaglio on their coated areas, so they carry raised print just as paper notes do. The Reserve Bank of Australia applies intaglio to its polymer notes for the portraits and numerals, and also uses it for intaglio microprint. The feel differs slightly because the ink sits on a coating rather than in paper fibre, but the raised-print test still works.