Giclee printing in plain words

Giclee means inkjet. The word was coined around 1991 by a printmaker who needed something to call fine art inkjet output that did not sound like an office printer, and it is taken from a French verb meaning to squirt. There is no standard behind it, no certifying body, and no minimum specification, so the term on a listing tells you nothing at all. What does tell you something is the ink, the number of ink channels, the paper and the file, and those four things are easy enough to ask about.

The word was invented to sell inkjet

In the late 1980s fine art reproduction was done on continuous flow inkjet proofing machines originally built for the prepress industry. The output was good and the name was commercially useless, because inkjet in 1990 meant a noisy desktop box that printed bank statements.

So the name changed and the process did not. A giclee is an inkjet print. A print described as a giclee might be made on a 12 ink wide format pigment printer on cotton rag, or on a three year old desktop machine with dye ink on copier paper, and the word covers both.

This is not a conspiracy, just vocabulary drift. It does mean that if a shop leads with the word giclee and will not tell you the ink type or the paper, you have learned something about the shop.

What actually decides quality

Four things, roughly in order. Ink chemistry: pigment ink is solid particles and is far more lightfast, dye ink is soluble and fades faster. Ink count, covered below. The paper, which sets the surface, the maximum black and how the ink sits. And colour management, which means whether somebody used a profile built for that exact printer and paper combination.

Then the file. Aim for about 300 pixels per inch at the final printed size, which means an 18 by 24 inch print wants a file around 5,400 by 7,200 pixels. Upscaling software can make a small file bigger but it cannot invent detail that was never captured or drawn, and on line artwork the giveaway is soft, slightly waxy edges.

Nothing in that list is visible from the word giclee, which is the point. Ask what ink, what paper, what size the original artwork is. Those are three short answers and any printer who takes the work seriously will have them.

Why eight ink channels beat four

A four colour printer has cyan, magenta, yellow and black, and it makes pale tones by placing dots further apart. In a light area you are therefore looking at scattered dots on white paper, which reads as grain. It also has to build neutral grey by mixing three colours, and any small drift in one of them turns the grey faintly green or pink.

Adding light cyan and light magenta lets pale areas be printed with weak ink densely rather than strong ink sparsely, which removes the grain. Adding two or three grey or photo black inks lets neutrals be printed with neutrals, which keeps them neutral and makes gradients smooth.

That is the real difference between a cheap print and a good one, and it is a hardware fact rather than a marketing claim. For a drawing that is mostly black line on cream with small areas of colour, the grey channels matter more than anything else, because that is where the subtle tone lives.

Offset, screen and inkjet, told apart with a loupe

Put a cheap jeweller's loupe on a print and it declares its process. Offset lithography shows a regular rosette: cyan, magenta, yellow and black dots on fixed screen angles, repeating in a tight pattern. It is the look of books, posters and anything printed in quantity, and the rosette is unmistakable once you have seen it.

Inkjet shows a cloud of very small dots in semi random positions with no rosette and no fixed angle, often with visibly different dot sizes. Screen printing shows a thick film of ink with a slightly raised edge, flat uniform colour, and sometimes a faint mesh texture in thin areas. Laser and toner prints show a surface sheen and slightly ragged, dusty looking edges.

Knowing this is useful when buying prints secondhand or at a market. A print sold as original artwork that shows a rosette under a loupe is a reproduction from a press run, whatever the label says.

Why the colour on your screen is not the colour on the paper

A screen emits light and mixes it additively, and its gamut includes colours that no ink can produce: saturated blue greens, electric oranges, anything that relies on raw luminance. Paper works subtractively, its white is the brightness of the sheet and its black is the deepest ink it can hold, so the whole range is smaller.

When a colour falls outside what the printer can make, colour management maps it to the nearest reachable colour. That is why a glowing teal on a monitor prints a shade flatter and a touch darker, and why nobody has ever been able to print a colour that looks backlit.

Matte paper trades maximum black for the absence of glare. A gloss surface can hold a denser black because the surface reflects less light back from inside the ink layer, so matte blacks measure as a very dark grey. For line drawing that is the right trade, because glare on a framed print behind glass costs you more than a fraction of density ever will. A drawing like Tangled on matte, under a lamp, stays readable from every angle in the room.

Limited editions are a contract, not a technique

An edition number says how many prints will exist. It says nothing about the ink, the paper, the printer or the care taken, and a numbered print from a bad machine is a bad print with a number on it.

Editions exist to create scarcity, which is a legitimate thing for an artist selling at high prices to do, and a meaningless thing for a print shop to imitate. An open edition printed to order is not a lesser object. It is just not rare.

We do not number our prints and we do not hold any. Everything is printed when it is ordered, which is also why we will never tell you that only a few are left: we would have to invent the number.

What we do, and what we call it

Our prints are inkjet, printed to order on archival matte at 192 gsm with a slight tooth. We say inkjet rather than giclee because giclee means inkjet and the longer word only exists to make it sound otherwise.

The drawing style is suited to the process. Dense black line on an uncoated sheet is the easiest thing to reproduce faithfully, which is why Visitors and Curled look like the original files rather than like approximations of them.

One thing to be clear about, because the product photographs show it: the frame is a mockup and is not included. The print arrives rolled in a tube with a thin white border so it can go straight into a mount.

Questions people actually ask

What is a giclee print?

An inkjet print. The word was coined around 1991 for fine art inkjet output and has no standard behind it, so it tells you nothing about ink, paper or quality. Ask what ink and what paper instead.

Is a giclee better than a normal print?

Not inherently, because giclee just means inkjet. What makes a print good is pigment rather than dye ink, a printer with light and grey ink channels, a proper paper, a correct colour profile and a file at around 300 ppi at final size.

How can I tell if a print is a reproduction?

Use a loupe. Offset lithography shows a regular four colour rosette of dots. Inkjet shows a semi random cloud of tiny dots with no rosette. Screen printing shows a thick raised ink film and flat colour.

Why does the print look different from the image on my screen?

A screen emits light and can show colours no ink can mix, especially saturated blue greens and bright oranges. Paper is subtractive with a smaller range, so out of gamut colours are mapped to the nearest printable ones and read slightly flatter.

Do limited edition prints last longer?

No. An edition number is a promise about quantity only. Longevity comes from pigment ink, a stable paper, UV filtering glazing and keeping the print out of direct light.