Why Giclée Prints Stay in RGB (When Everything Else Goes CMYK)

You've got your artwork ready to send. Somewhere along the way, quite possibly on this very blog, you've read that files for print need to be in CMYK. So you dutifully convert, flatten and send it over. For most print jobs that's exactly the right thing to do. For giclée, it's the one time you shouldn't.

Giclée is the exception to the "always use CMYK" rule, and it's worth a few minutes to understand why. Get colour right and your print looks like your original, only richer. Get it wrong and it can come back flat and muted, with the life drained out of the colours you cared about most.

The short version

If you remember nothing else: for giclée, work in Adobe RGB (1998), embed the colour profile when you save, and don't convert to CMYK. That's the whole rule. Everything below explains why, and what to do if your file isn't in Adobe RGB already.

A quick reminder: RGB vs CMYK

RGB is the colour of light. Screens, cameras and scanners build colour from red, green and blue. CMYK is the colour of ink: cyan, magenta, yellow and black, mixed on paper by a printing press. We told the full story in our earlier post, CMYK vs RGB???, so the part that matters here is just this: RGB can describe a far wider range of colours than four inks can physically reproduce.

Why the press needs CMYK

When we print your flyers, business cards or booklets on our digital press, four process inks do all the work. Converting your file to CMYK (we work to the Coated FOGRA39 standard) lets us predict exactly how those four inks will mix on the paper, so there are no surprises when the sheets come off the press. That earlier advice absolutely stands: for press work, CMYK is the way to go.

Why giclée is different

Giclée doesn't use four process inks. Our large-format printers lay down eleven archival pigment inks, far more than a press uses, through paper-specific colour profiles we build ourselves. That inkset reproduces a much wider range of colours than four-colour printing ever could, especially in rich blues, deep greens and vivid saturated tones.

Convert to CMYK, though, and you squeeze your image into the narrow band of colours four inks can mix, throwing away every colour the giclée process could have printed. Those colours don't come back once the file is converted; it only goes one way. Convert to CMYK for a giclée and you're really handing us a muted version of your work and asking us to reproduce it faithfully. We would far rather have the real thing.

So for giclée we keep everything in RGB right up to the moment of printing, and let our profiles map your colours onto the paper as fully as it allows.

Why Adobe RGB, not sRGB

Not all RGB is equal. sRGB is the smaller, safe-for-the-web standard your phone and browser default to. Adobe RGB (1998) is wider, holding on to more of those vivid greens and cyans, and it sits closer to what our papers and inks can actually render. If you're starting a piece from scratch, setting your working space to Adobe RGB (1998) gives you the most colour to work with.

If your file is already in sRGB, there's no need to worry. sRGB fits entirely inside Adobe RGB, so a proper colour-managed conversion (Convert to Profile in Photoshop) keeps every colour looking exactly as it did. It won't harm anything. It also won't add colour the file never captured, so converting up to Adobe RGB won't make the print any more vivid than the file already allows. The simplest approach is to embed the sRGB profile and send the file as it is. We convert it into the correct print profile at our end.

The one command to avoid is Assign Profile, which is a different thing altogether. Assigning Adobe RGB to sRGB numbers relabels them without doing the conversion maths, and that genuinely does shift your colours, usually pushing them too saturated. Convert, don't assign. If you're ever unsure, leave the file in sRGB and let us take care of it.

The step that ties it all together: embed the profile

Whatever space your file is in, embed the colour profile when you save. In Photoshop, tick "ICC Profile" (Windows) or "Embed Color Profile" (Mac) in the save dialog. A file with no embedded profile is like a recipe with no units: we can read the numbers, but not what they are meant to mean. Embed it, and your colours arrive unambiguous.

What happens at our end

You don't need to be a colour scientist for any of this. We profile every paper we stock using a spectrophotometer, building custom ICC profiles right here in the studio (more on that in What Is Giclée Printing?). When your Adobe RGB file arrives, we soft-proof it and print through the profile for your chosen Innova or Canson stock, mapping your colours as faithfully as that paper allows.

See it before you commit

Every screen shows colour a little differently, so the surest way to judge is to hold a print in your hand. Order our giclée sample pack to see how each paper renders colour, or take our discounted A4 proof to check your own image before committing to the full size.

When you're ready, email your file and the details to info@saxonprint.com and we'll check the colour and profile before anything goes to print, or order straight through the website.

We're a small studio in Winchcombe, near Cheltenham, and colour is the part we take most seriously. A giclée print should look like your original, only better.