What is a “Giclée Print”?

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giclee

Giclée (pronounced “zhee-clay”) , is an invented name for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing The term is often used instead of Inkjet in art shops. The word “giclée”, from the French language word “le gicleur” meaning “nozzle”, or more specifically “gicler” meaning “to squirt, spurt, or spray”.

It was coined by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial “Iris proofs” from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers.

The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print.

Beside its association with Iris prints, in the past few years, the word “giclée,” as a fine art term, has come to be associated with prints using fade resistant “archival” inks (including solvent inks) and the printers that use them.

These printers use the CMYK color process but may have multiple cartridges for variations of each color based on the CcMmYK color model (e.g. light magenta and light cyan inks in addition to regular magenta and cyan) which serves to increase the apparent resolution and color gamut and allows smoother gradient transitions.

The most common printers used are models from manufacturers such as Canon, Eastman Kodak, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, ITNH Ixia, Mimaki, Mutoh, ColorSpan, and Roland DGA. A wide variety of substrates are available including various textures and finishes such as matte photo paper, watercolor paper, or cotton canvas. Indeed, a new industry has been created in supplying the media for this emerging market.

Artists tend to use these types of Giclée printing processes to make reproductions of their original two-dimensional artwork, photographs or computer generated art. Giclée style prints are much more expensive on a “per print” basis than the traditional four color offset lithography process originally used to make such reproductions (a large Giclée can cost more than $50 a print, not including scanning and color correction, as opposed to $5 a print for a four-color offset litho of the same image printed in a run of 1000).

However, since the artist does not need to pay for, market and store large print runs or produce printing plates and, since the artist can print and sell each print individually to match demand, Giclée can be an economical alternative when producing limited editions of prints. Giclée printing has the added advantage of allowing the artist to control every aspect of the image, its color and the substrate printed on, and even allows the artist to own and operate the printer itself.