About Giclee Printing

Giclée, commonly pronounced "zhee-clay," is an invented name for the process of making canvas art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word “giclée”, from the French language word "gicleur" meaning "nozzle", was created 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.

The earliest prints to be called "Giclée" were created in the early 1990s on the Iris Graphics models 3024, 3047, 4012 or "Realist" colour drum continuous Hertz inkjet printers (the company was later taken over by Scitex). Iris printers were originally developed to produce prepress proofs from digital files for jobs where color matching was critical such as product containers and magazine publication. Their output was used to check what the colors would look like before mass production began. There was much experimentation that took place to try to adapt the Iris printer to the production of color faithful, aesthetically pleasing reproductions of artwork. Early Iris prints were relatively fugitive and tended to show color degradation after only a few years. The use of newer inksets and printing substrates have extended the longevity and light fastness of Iris prints.

Beside continued development of 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 and the printers that use them. These printers use the CMYK color process but may have multiple cartridges for variations of each color that increases the apparent resolution and color gamut and allows smoother gradient transitions[1]. The most common printers used are models from manufacturers such as Canon, Eastman Kodak, Epson 7600 and epson 9600, Hewlett-Packard, ITNH Ixia, Mimaki, Mutoh, ColorSpan, and Roland DGA.

Artists tend to use these types of "Giclée" printing processes to make limited edition high end reproduction prints of their original two dimensional artwork, photographs, or computer generated digital 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 over £50 per print not including scanning and color correction as opposed to £5 per print for a four color offset litho of the same image printed in a run of 1000). But since the artist does not need pay for, market, and store large canvas print runs, and since the artist can print and sell each print individually to match demand, "Giclée" can be an economical alternative when producing limited print editions. Giclée style printing has the added advantage of allowing the artist to control every aspect of the image, its color, the substrate printed on, and even allows the artist to own and operate the printer itself. Because of this, Giclée style prints can technically be called prints, i.e. an image where the artist has a hand in actual production.