There's a very interesting segment of digital printing
that's devoted to the creation of fine art prints.
And this is referred to as the art of Giclée.
These prints are beautiful, and they're long-lasting.
They use fade-resistant pigments.
And they also use archival quality paper, so these are going to last.
There are substrates with textures such as
photo paper or textured canvas or watercolor paper.
And there's no halftone pattern, which you'd see if
the fine art print were printed on most offset presses.
Digital printing for a fine art print is efficient and it's cost-effective.
You can print limited editions.
You could limit it to just one, for that matter.
So there's no need for a large press
run, and that means that there's no minimum inventory.
In fact, there doesn't have to be any inventory
at all until there's an order for the print.
And, there are no offset printing plates to create and store.
Now, the per print cost might be high.
It could be 50 to 100 dollars.
It depends on the size of the print that you're creating.
But that short run, of just one possibly, compensates for the per print cost.
Faithful art reproduction is capable because of digital printing because of the
wide color gamut of the colorants that are used on these inkjet devices.
The colorants are much more vibrant than standard offset inks.
And they go beyond cyan, magenta, yellow and
black, the process colors used on an offset press.
They may add colorants such as light magenta,
or light cyan, or orange, or green, or purple.
It depends on the vendor.
That may sound a little bit odd, but it makes it possible
to render colors that go beyond the gamut that's provided by CMYK.
Now, the art source could be something like
a conventional oil painting, or watercolor, or drawing.
But to capture that, it would have to be scanned or subjected to photography.
And there may be some color correction and some retouching necessary in
order to ensure that the original is faithfully rendered in the print.
Of course, if it's digital art, you can just output it directly to that printer.
A little bit about Giclée itself, the concept and the implementation.
Originally, Giclée was a product of one
particular kind of printing device, the Iris printer.
Iris was then purchased by Scitex, and then Creo, and now it's
owned by Kodak, and Kodak markets these printers under a line called Veris.
Now, there are other giclée printers, Iris isn't the only possibility.
HP, and Canon, and Epson all make very high quality
printers that are used for creating these fine art prints.
Now, about the word giclée, which might seem a little foreign to you.
The origin is from a company called Nash Editions.
Now if you remember a singing group Crosby Stills Nash and Young.
Graham Nash is the Nash of Nash Editions.
He wanted a way to output his high quality photographs in a faithful fashion.
Researched what the possibilities for and ended up creating this company,
Nash Editions, and they had to have a name for this product.
But they wanted to have an interesting name for the process.
So they derived Giclee from the French gicleur.
And I'm probably not saying it right.
Meaning nozzle.
The reason is, those inkjet printers use little tiny
nozzles to deposit infinitesimal dots of ink on paper.
And that's how they render that fine detail and beautiful color.
So if you want to impress your
friends, the accepted, current pronunciation is zhee-clay.
So, there you have it.
Digital printing has really opened up a whole new
world of fine art rendition for connoisseurs of fine artwork.