Giclee Printing
The Giclée process or giclee as it is often miss spelt, is the process of making fine art prints from a digital source. Giclee Printing has come to mean high quality digital printing and is the preferred choice now for most artists. Giclee Printing is not cheap, but its advantage lies in the ability to print on demand and therefore not committing to a huge lithographic run. The other benefit of Giclee Printing is the quality which can be indistinguishable from an original when printed side by side. All sorts of media are now used in Giclee Printing from watercolour paper, photo gloss paper, matte paper as well as the range of 100% cotton and polypixel canvas types. Fine Art Giclee Printing is a specialist field and the printers used are often large format with rolls of 44" paper and canvas used. Epsom lead the way in Giclee Printing and Giclee Printers and their Epsom 9800 is considered to offer the best quality art prints reproduction.

Giclee Prints
Due to cost, Giclee Prints are most commonly used for Limited Editions. Limited Edition Giclee Prints can have edition sizes from just 1 up to 1000 although commonly an edition falls below 500 in size. Giclee Prints are printed using fade-resistant, archival inks, lightfast for at least 75 years. Many Giclee Prints are treated after the initial print process. A varnish, glaze or spray, with a variety of both, are added in order to protect or create a particular finish to the end result. A varnished Giclee Print will appear very different to an unvarnished print if on a matte or soft textured watercolour media.

Fine Art Printing
The word "giclée," is now a Fine Art Printing term and, as above, is a fine art, high quality digital print. There are many different techniques beyond giclee printing to produce Fine Art Printing. This process is ideal for artists to make reproductions of their original two-dimensional artwork, photographs or computer-generated art. Fine Art Printing using a giclee Inkjet printer has the added advantage of allowing the artist to control every aspect of the image. Offset printing is another and widely used printing technique where the inked image is transferred (or offset) from a plate to a rubber blanket, then to the printing surface. This form of Fine Art Printing, has been used for year. When used in combination with the lithographic process the offset technique employs a flat image carrier on which the image to be printed obtains ink from ink rollers, while the non-printing area attracts a film of water, keeping the non-printing areas ink-free.