Gicleé Prints

What is a giclee?
A one of a kind archival museum quality print!

The definition: giclee (zheeclay) is a French term meaning "spray of ink".  An ink jet print on paper or canvas is known as a giclee. The word may have been derived from the French word “giclee” meaning “to squirt”.  

The process: Each giclee print is “one of a kind”. Today’s giclee printing process provides superior color accuracy and archivability over other means of reproduction.  The quality rivals, and often exceeds, traditional silver-halide and gelatin photographic printing processes. Giclee prints are commonly found in art museums and photographic galleries such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the museum of modern art and the Chelsea galleries.

The advantages: Tom Gamache’s original photographic prints are created using large and medium format conventional film camera. Custom chemical development is used to maximize the color, saturation and contrast of the original transparencies.

Large (700+ gb and higher per image) digital files are then created from the film originals using a highly specialized Aztec premier 8000 dpi laser drum scanner. The files are so large that film grain virtually disappears, creating an entirely new, smoother and more realistic surface texture.  

Once digitized, the files are maximized in a sophisticated image-processing application. The image is returned its original, natural appearance in hue, tone, brilliance, contrast and other original properties prior to being captured on film and altered by scanning processes.   A state-of-the-art monitor creates a finely calibrated representation of the image, that is tested, optimized and, once approved by the artist, becomes a final print.

The Hewlett Packard HP Z6100PS, an advanced, large format  archival ink jet printer using continuous tone technology in which infinitely small color ink pigmented droplets are sprayed onto the printing surface four to five million per second. The result is a very smooth, long lasting print. Once completed, each image can be comprised of 20 billion or more droplets of ink, each one measuring no more than a few microns in diameter. The print is completed by the application of a UV light retardant coating. The result is a one of kind museum quality, exhibition photographic print.

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