Giclée print
Also known as: Giclée · Inkjet fine-art print · Archival pigment print
A giclée is a fine-art print made on a high-resolution inkjet press, using archival pigment inks on heavyweight cotton or alpha-cellulose paper.
“Giclée” — pronounced “zhee-clay” — is the name commercial printers gave to inkjet-based fine-art printing in the early 1990s. The technique uses a wide-format printer to lay archival pigment inks onto heavyweight cotton-rag or alpha-cellulose paper. The result is a print with a long colour gamut, fine tonal range, and a lifespan that easily exceeds a century under glass.
What distinguishes a giclée from a regular photo-lab print is the materials. The pigments are particle-based rather than dye-based, so they don’t shift or fade in the way older inkjet prints do. The paper is heavyweight and acid-free; it doesn’t yellow with age. The printer itself lays down ink at very high resolution, with no halftone screen, so up close the surface reads as continuous tone rather than dots.
Most contemporary fine-art print editions sold by galleries today are giclées. Every print we ship at Clark & Darcey is a giclée on Hahnemühle German Etching 310gsm — a heavyweight 100% α-cellulose paper with a soft, velvety matt surface. The Hahnemühle paper is fade-rated for more than 100 years under glass, independently tested by Wilhelm Imaging Research.
A giclée is not the same as a screenprint, lithograph, or etching — those are physical reproduction techniques with their own surface qualities. A giclée is a digital print. Whether you prefer it to one of those older processes is a matter of taste and budget; what’s not in question is that a properly made giclée is an archival object.