Sunday, March 12, 2006
What is a giclee?
After receiving so many calls from prospective customers who just learned about the term giclee, it is in probably a good idea to shed some light on the term and what it means both literally and as a product. Giclee is often mispelled as geclee, glicee, gicle.
Giclee is a French noun deriving from the verb gicler (to squirt). It refers to the technology used by inkjet printers to spray inks onto the paper. The term giclee was coined to separate this fine art printmaking method from a lowly inkjet print. The latter is made on a cheap machine with non archival materials and without the technical and artistic skills to produce an exquisite rendering of a digital file.
While there is no set guideline to distinguish a giclee as such, the characteristics of a true giclee are as follows:
-Use of a professional grade printer
-Use of archival inks
-Use of acid free, possibly optical brightnere free papers
-Expert scanning and file preparation
-Use of calibrated hardware with proper ICC profiles
These are basic components of what a giclee needs to be defined with. I know this can be confusing. As with most things in life, you get what you pay for and there is simply no way that cheap hardware and materials will create prints that rival professional grade machines. Last but not least, expensive hardware can be bought but the skills to color correct, research new and better materials, keep abreast of technology are a full time concern.
Technorati tag: giclee
Giclee is a French noun deriving from the verb gicler (to squirt). It refers to the technology used by inkjet printers to spray inks onto the paper. The term giclee was coined to separate this fine art printmaking method from a lowly inkjet print. The latter is made on a cheap machine with non archival materials and without the technical and artistic skills to produce an exquisite rendering of a digital file.
While there is no set guideline to distinguish a giclee as such, the characteristics of a true giclee are as follows:
-Use of a professional grade printer
-Use of archival inks
-Use of acid free, possibly optical brightnere free papers
-Expert scanning and file preparation
-Use of calibrated hardware with proper ICC profiles
These are basic components of what a giclee needs to be defined with. I know this can be confusing. As with most things in life, you get what you pay for and there is simply no way that cheap hardware and materials will create prints that rival professional grade machines. Last but not least, expensive hardware can be bought but the skills to color correct, research new and better materials, keep abreast of technology are a full time concern.
Technorati tag: giclee
