I can now offer high-end in-house giclee printing up to A2+ size for my clients, offering beautiful, vibrant images on archival-quality rated to last at least 100 years.
What is ‘giclee printing’ and why does it matter?
‘Giclee printing’ is a term invented by American print maker Jack Duganne in the early 1990s to describe a process for making lasting fine art prints using a new breed of high-end inket printers, which were being used in the printing industry for proofing colour books. Until then, high quality traditional offset printing was used for creating many art reproductions, but this still required a reasonable print run to be economically viable.
Giclee printing offers even greater quality that offset printing and the advantage of being able to offer one off prints. Duganne chose to call the process ‘giclee’ (based on the French language word le gicleur’) to denote something different to the run-off-the-mill inkjet printing consumers are used to at home.
Giclee inkjets are professional systems with high quality inks designed to last for at least 100 years. The printers have multiple cartridges for variations of each CMYK color based on the such as light magenta and light cyan inks in addition to regular magenta and cyan. This allows far greater reslution and much smoother transitions between colours.
The process is completed through the use of archival quality papers, which again add to longevity, from simple gloss or lustre papers through to ‘watercolor paper’, cotton canvas, linen, etc.
Why offer the giclee process in-house?
With in-house giclee printing I can gain even greater control of the process and save time. With carefully-controlled colour calibration there are fewer ‘nasty surprises’ when photos come back from the lab these days, but it means I can see results right away on my desktop and fix and minor issues that may have been missed right away. For larger prints there’s a modest cost saving too.
Portrait clients that have received prints from the new system so far have been blown away but the sheer quality, clarity and vibrance of the images. I can offer prints up to a size of A2+ and a tastefully framed A2 print with a deep mount makes a spectacular piece of wall art. As before, I can offer even larger prints, canvases, aluminium prints handled by print partners. My personal favourite way to display photography, however, is always in a black frame with a bright white mount – how images are generally displayed at exhibitions.
I am a photographer/artists. Can I send you my images for printing?
Generally speaking, for larger prints, I can offer pricing a little lower than most labs for Bristol-based customers. Get in touch with details of your requirements to learn more.
Additionally, if you are an artist that would like to produce limited print runs of pieces of work I can again get in touch for a quote. I can also offer photographic reproductions of artworks that are too larger to too textured/three dimensional for flatbed scanning.