The invention provides a printing method of printing on a printing medium. The method includes: performing a halftone process with a dither matrix on image data that represents a tone value of each pixel making up an original image to determine a state of dot formation at each of print pixels of a print image that is to be formed on the printing medium, and generating dot data that represents the determined state of dot formation; and generating a print image by mutually combining each of dot groups that are formed at each of a plurality of pixel groups in a common print region according to the dot data, the plurality of pixel groups being assumed to have different physical conditions with respect to the dot formation. The dither matrix stores each threshold value such that a number of dots to be allocated to each of the plurality of dot groups is determined according to a dot formation order of each of the plurality of dot groups in the common print region in the halftone process.