What Is Giclée Printing?
If you're a photographer or an artist, you know that reproducing artwork takes a lot of time and care. You may have heard of giclée printing and wondered what it is and how it differs from other types of printing. Read on to discover how to produce mind-blowing prints without blowing your budget.
What Is Giclée Printing?
Giclée is French, and translates as "squirt" or "spray", which is a slightly posh way to describe the technique. Giclée prints are produced with top-end inkjet printers that spray ink onto the paper. Although all giclée prints are inkjet prints, not all inkjet prints are giclée prints. A few things separate a true giclée print from an ordinary one.
Inks
For giclée we use archival pigment inks rather than the cheaper dye-based inks found in most home printers. Pigment inks are made to a higher standard, with proven lightfastness and stability under different lighting, so colours hold true whether a print is seen in daylight or under a lamp, and they resist fading for generations.
They also give us far more colour to work with. Where a home inkjet printer uses four to six inks, our large-format printers carry eleven archival pigment inks. Alongside the familiar cyan, magenta and yellow, they add extra light inks for smoother gradients, several blacks and greys for deeper shadows and cleaner neutral tones, and further colours that extend the range into areas a home printer simply can't reach. The result is a wider gamut, richer blacks and the subtle tonal transitions that separate a true giclée print from an everyday inkjet one.
Colour Accuracy
To keep colour accurate across all our different papers, we build custom ICC profiles. An ICC (International Color Consortium) profile is a file describing exactly how a particular printer, ink and paper combination reproduces colour. The standard profiles that come with a home printer are made in ideal lab conditions, so they rarely match the real world of your room, your inks and your paper. Using a spectrophotometer and specialist software, we build our own profiles for each paper in our actual studio conditions, which is how we get the truest colour from every print. It's also why we ask you to send files in RGB with the profile embedded, which we explain in our guide to colour.
Paper Stock
We print on high-quality stock, including acid-free, museum-grade papers that are free of optical brightening agents, so a print can be kept for generations without yellowing or shifting. That makes our range ideal for fine art, photographic and digital artwork alike. And because we print large format on 44-inch rolls, we aren't limited to home-printer sizes: we can produce images up to 43 inches (well over a metre) wide, and longer still for panoramic pieces. If you're wondering how large your own file can go, our guide to resolution walks through it.
Now that you know how giclée printing works, here's a look at our range of giclée products.
Fine Art Prints
Choose from our range of museum quality Canson and Innova fine art papers, available in a variety of textures so you can pick the perfect finish for your project. Printed to the highest standards and left unmounted, ready for you to choose your own frame or mount.
Canvas Prints
A traditional way to display fine photography and artwork. Our canvas prints are produced on superior canvas with a specially formulated coating designed for high-quality fine art reproduction. Printed edge to edge, given a matte varnish to protect the surface, then wrapped on sturdy either 38mm gallery or 18mm frames to your specification.
Photographic Prints
Eye-catching photographic prints on a choice of gloss and matte art papers, perfect as feature or standalone pieces. With superb clarity, natural colour and smooth graduations, we reproduce your images on our specialist press for genuinely accurate results. Left unmounted, ready for you to choose the perfect frame or mount for your home.
If you can't decide which material to print on, don't fret. Order a pre-printed sample set to see and feel the quality for yourself and find the perfect paper for your project. Your sample pack also comes with a voucher code for £5.00 off any product in our Photographic, Fine Art and Canvas Prints collection.
When your file is ready, our giclée file checklist covers exactly what we need to print it beautifully the first time.