What Is a Giclée Print?

The word looks more complicated than the thing. Giclée is French, it rhymes roughly with "klee-shay," and it was coined in the late 1980s to describe a then-new way of printing fine art with an inkjet press. The name stuck because the people making the work needed a word that did not sound like the photocopier in the corner of an office. You will also see the same thing called an archival pigment print, which is the plainer, more honest name for it. What both describe is simple: a high-resolution print made by laying archival pigment ink onto fine art paper, one microscopic drop at a time.

That is the whole idea. But the gap between a giclée print and the poster you might find in a high-street shop is wide, and it is worth understanding before you spend money on anything you intend to keep.

The difference is pigment and paper

Most cheap prints are made with dye ink on coated paper. Dye sits on the surface and fades, sometimes within a couple of years in a bright room. The colour shifts, the blacks go thin, and the whole thing starts to look like a photograph of itself.

A true giclée uses pigment ink instead of dye. Pigment is made of solid colour particles rather than dissolved dye, and it holds its tone for decades rather than seasons, under recommended display conditions. This resistance to fading has a name in the trade, lightfastness, and it is measured by independent labs such as Wilhelm Imaging Research rather than claimed by the seller. Pair a lightfast pigment ink with an acid-free cotton paper that carries no optical brighteners, and you have a print built to last, not to be replaced. Everything in the loft is printed this way, on Hahnemühle cotton papers. We wrote about why that paper matters in why we print on Hahnemühle.

There is also the question of how many colours the press can lay down. A standard office printer uses four inks. The press we use carries twelve. Those extra inks are not a gimmick. They are what let the print hold the quiet steps between tones, the warmth inside a shadow, the slow shift from one grey to the next, the parts of an image that a four-ink press simply rounds off and loses.

The process is not the magic. The care around it is.

Giclée or C-type: a quick distinction

If you have shopped for photographic prints you may have met the term C-type. A C-type is a true photographic print, made by exposing light-sensitive paper and processing it with chemicals. It can be beautiful, with a particular smoothness, but it is usually less stable in light over the long run and the surface is fixed to a photo stock rather than a fine art paper. A giclée, by contrast, is a pigment inkjet print, and it can be made on a cotton rag sheet chosen for the image. For work you intend to hang for years, a pigment giclée on cotton is the more durable keep. Neither is the artwork by itself. Both are ways of getting an image onto a wall.

Why "giclée" is hard to pin down in India

If you search for giclée printing in India, you will mostly find printing services. Studios that will print your file onto fine art paper for a fee. That is a real and useful trade, but it is not the same as buying a finished work of art.

The difference is what surrounds the print. A printing service hands you a sheet. A fine art edition gives you a specific image, by a named artist, printed on a named paper, in a known size, often as part of a limited run with a certificate that records it. The giclée process is the same in both cases. What changes is whether anyone stands behind the image as a work worth keeping.

This is the gap the loft sits in. The photographs in Letters from Elsewhere and the paintings in Ground Notes are giclée prints in the technical sense, but they arrive as works, not as print jobs. The file was made by an artist. The paper was chosen for the image. The size was considered. The edition, where it is limited, was capped and numbered. If that finiteness is new to you, how to start collecting art prints explains what an edition actually gives you.

What to ask before you buy any print

If you are looking at a print anywhere, three questions tell you most of what you need to know.

Get specific answers to those three and you will rarely be disappointed by what arrives. A giclée print, made properly, is one of the few ways to own original-quality artwork without owning the original. So the next time you see the word on a product page, you will know what to ask. What is the ink, what is the paper, and how many of these will ever exist?

Common questions