Giclée Printing – The Technology That Changed How We Print Art

The word giclée comes from the French gicler, roughly "to spray" or "to squirt" – a reference to how the ink is applied in microscopically fine droplets rather than pressed onto the paper as in traditional printing. It describes a process, not a subject or style: giclée can reproduce a 19th-century oil painting just as well as a contemporary photograph or digital illustration.

The difference from standard offset printing lies in how the colour is built up. Offset works with four base colours blended in halftone dots – efficient for large print runs, but limited in its colour range. Giclée technology uses considerably more colour channels and sprays the ink directly, opening up a broader spectrum of tones and smoother transitions between them.

The technology originates from equipment that was never intended for artistic use. The first large-format Iris printers were originally built for colour proofing in the publishing and printing industry – a way for print shops to preview how an image would look before it went to the main press. The image quality far exceeded what the purpose required, something a few observant people in the art world noticed in the early 1990s.

Among them was Graham Nash, who, together with his company Nash Editions, began experimenting with printing photographs and artworks on exactly that type of printer. Printmaker Jack Duganne coined the term giclée to describe the result – partly to give the technique an artistically resonant name, and partly to distinguish it from the industrial "inkjet" term already in everyday use. From there, the method quickly spread among galleries and artists wanting to produce editions without compromising the feel of the original.

This is also why the technique suits reproductions of older paintings so well – works where every brushstroke and every glazed layer of colour carries meaning.

Modern giclée printers of the type used for art prints today often work with up to twelve different ink colours, compared to offset printing's four. More channels mean more possible combinations, which in practice means the printer can reproduce nuances that would otherwise have to be "guessed" at through halftoning.

This is most noticeable in exactly the areas that tend to cause problems in cheaper prints: deep blues, shifting greens, and the subtle gradients that occur when one colour slowly transitions into another. A sky painted in layers of cobalt and ultramarine, or a green meadow shifting to yellow at the edges, requires a register of intermediate tones that a four-colour system simply doesn't have access to.

It's no coincidence that the technique is often highlighted in connection with expressive, colour-rich works – where variation in brushstroke and hue is part of the expression, not just decoration.

The difference is clearest when you place a giclée print next to a lower-quality print, motif by motif. Water surfaces are a good test – they require green, blue, and white to meet without forming hard edges. Night scenes are another, where black is rarely completely black but contains undertones of blue or brown that either show up or disappear depending on the print's colour range.

It's not about making the image "prettier" than the original, but about staying as true as possible to what the artist actually painted or photographed – the nuance in a shadow, the sheen on a stream, the elusive quality of a bed bathed in afternoon light.

Knowing how a print was made is rarely decisive on its own – but it explains why two seemingly identical images can look completely different in real life. Giclée technology is, at its core, a method for taking colour reproduction seriously, whether the subject is an abstract composition or a hundred-year-old oil painting. Combined with the right paper – a story of its own, explored in the guide to art print quality – the result is a print that holds up to close viewing, not just a passing glance.