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What is Giclée?

If you walk into an art gallery or go through their cat­a­logue, chances are you would find a sec­tion reserved for repro­duced art­work. It would come under the strange sound­ing name, giclée (pro­nounced zhee-clay). What exactly is giclée, you might wonder.

Giclée is a type of dig­i­tal fine-art inkjet print, usu­ally repro­duc­tions of art­work orig­i­nally cre­ated in tra­di­tional media (paint­ings, draw­ing, and so on). Before the era of high qual­ity dig­i­tal print­ing, fine art prints were usu­ally pro­duced by con­ven­tional four-color off­set lith­o­g­ra­phy. Since the 1990s, that role has been taken over by giclée printing.

His­tory:

In the late 1980’s, the dig­i­tal print­ing pio­neers were look­ing for a new iden­tity for the beau­ti­ful prints they had worked so hard to achieve.  They wanted a dis­tinc­tion between their artis­tic work and the com­mer­cial pre-press proofs churned out by IRIS printers.

Ini­tially, IRIS prints were not quite top­notch. Their color fast­ness was doubt­ful, and the prints tended to fade within a few years.  It was also not pos­si­ble to achieve a com­pletely smooth tran­si­tion of color gra­di­ents, so impor­tant for repro­duc­ing art­work. After all, they were used mainly to match col­ors before the mass scale print run. (more…)

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