About Giclee Printing

We use a method called Giclee printing to produce your photographs. This is un-like your typical desktop printer, or those prints produced by big chains or for murals. These are high-quality, long lasting photo enlargements.

What is Giclee printing?
From the French verb "to spray", the word Giclee (zhee-clay) is used to describe a certain standard in printmaking technology.

Images or paintings are scanned to high resolution digital files. The artwork is then carefully reproduced using a high-end ink jet printer and stable pigment-based inks onto various substrates, the most common being watercolor paper.

History of Giclee printing.
Giclee prints evolved from Iris prints (a 4 color ink jet printer line pioneered in the late 1970s by Iris Graphics). Iris technology was first developed as a proofing process for digital prepress applications. The high quality of the process was noticed in the mid 1980s by pioneers of giclée printing like Graham Nash (of Cosby, Stills and Nash) and ink jet pioneer Jon Cone.

Who is Giclee good for?
Giclee is very suitable for artists, both digital and traditional, who want intimate control over small reproduction runs. Giclee is becoming more of a mainstream option for photographers who want a wider range of output options than traditional photographic reprints.

Giclee is for any artist who wants high quality prints that are affordable in small quantities and will last longer than most other methods of reproduction.

Giclee vs an Iris or offset print.
Giclee prints are more sophisticated than Iris prints. Special inks have been developed for giclee printers that provide better color accuracy, expanded color gamut and longer life of the print. Giclee inks resist fading 10 times longer than those used in Iris prints.

Giclee prints can be more affordable than lithographs. With lithos, you have to print and buy all of the prints at once. With giclee prints, you can print a small run or you can print one at a time as you sell them. You can have little to no inventory, so your startup costs are much less. Also, since no screens are used in giclee printing, the prints have a higher effective resolution than lithographs.

Another tremendous advantage to Giclee printing is that artwork can be reproduced to almost any size and on various media, giving the artist the ability to customize prints for a specific client.

The large-format Epson Stylus® Photo 2200 delivers remarkable archival photos up to 13” x 19” on a wide variety of papers. The first desktop photo printer to use seven pigment inks, the Epson Stylus Photo 2200 provides the highest quality output available from any pigment-based ink jet.

Is Giclee good for reproducing photographs?
Computer techniques for dodging, burning, color correction and touching up have come a long way since the darkroom. Our owner Brian Sullivan, spent many years as a master photo lab technician in the Boston area, working with hundreds of photographers to produce high-quality prints. A giclee output by a trained technician can add greater aesthetic value and longer life to your photographs over standard photo reprints.

About edition sizes.

  • Edition Size: The total number of archival photo enlargements from one particular image.
  • Limited-Edition: A predetermined number of photo enlargements published from an original work of art. The total number of photo enlargements is fixed by the artist or the publisher in order to create a scarcity of the print. The artist's signature is usually found in one of the lower corners of the photo enlargements and is accompanied by a number that looks like a fraction; the top number indicates the number of the photo enlargements and the bottom number indicates the total number of giclee in the edition.
  • Open-Edition: A reproduction of an original artwork that is sometimes signed by the artist. The number of photo enlargements published is not predetermined.

Proofing my photo enlargements .
The proofing procedure will differ depending on the customer's needs. Some customers only expect pleasing color while others may want the print to exactly match the original. Usually, one proof and some color correction are all that is needed to please most customers.

For the digital artist, proofing makes sense since matching color on a monitor can be difficult due to the color variances between monitors. The proof can also be archived and used as a guide for reprints. Since output can vary, the archived proof is what insures consistent results.

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