Giclée Printing for Artists and Photographers

Giclée prints - high quality, affordable reproductions

If you are an artist or photographer looking for the best quality reproductions of your work, look no further - Giclée prints are the solution! Let's say you're an artist and you've spent hours making an oil or watercolour painting for example, or perhaps a pastel or pencil drawing. You've created an original artwork: just the one.

Wouldn't it be great if you could have ten or twenty of them? You could sell them in art fairs or in galleries, or off your web site. You could sell them at a price people can afford. You would want them to be good though. You couldn't put up with dodgy colours or with prints that fade, or are on nasty paper. You want Giclée reproductions from Chromatech.

You might be a photographer, and have a set of really nice slides or digital images. Wouldn't it be great if you could have really good prints made, on art paper, that look fantastic? You need giclée prints too.

What are Giclée prints?

Giclée prints are very high quality and very high resolution reproductions made on the latest generation of inkjet printers. They are made from a digital file (ie a scan from an artwork or photograph, or a digital camera file) using special long life inks and top quality art papers.

The benefits of Giclée printing include:

  • Superb image quality
  • Greatly reduced initial costs compared to conventional (lithographic) printing.
  • Print an edition as you receive orders, helps your cash flow and eliminates storage problems.
  • No need to complete an edition, eliminating unsold wasted prints.
  • Limited edition prints on really good paper gives a high value to the print, therefore more income.
  • Lightfast inksets give long life to the print, much longer than conventional printing.
  • Higher quality reproduction than conventional printing
  • You have the opportunity to test market a new image at a realistic price.

By adding Giclée reproductions to your portfolio you will create a new market for your artwork. It is often easier to sell more prints at a lower price than one original at a high price, plus you have sold to a wider audience. Perfect for self-publishing your artwork.

Ink and Paper

We print onto 24" wide paper, giving the opportunity to print up to A1 size (23x47", 600x840mm). The paper we use is a Hahnemuhle 310 gsm paper. It is a beautiful art paper, white but not overly bright and it looks really good. It's an acid free archival cotton rag paper that gives excellent long life prints - up to 100 years! The canvas is white Artist Canvas, 100% pure cotton.

We use the latest generation of Epson UltraChrome inks, giving an extremely wide colour range. The inks give very smooth tonal variations in both colour and B/W prints, and Epson boast a lightfastness in excess of 75 years indoor display life (published test conditions available).

Our scanners, monitors and printers have been set up and colour profiled by Neil Barstow (www.colourmanagement.net) to give the most accurate results possible.

The Costs

The costs come in two parts: the first is for the image capture of the original and the second is for making the prints. Remember that any number of prints can be made at any time after the image has been set up.

If your artwork is small (up to about A4 size) or is on transparency, the setup cost is £35.00 per image. Setup involves scanning the original, setting it up on screen to get the closest colour match and producing a proof print. If your artwork is larger than A4, the artwork is photographed with a high resolution digital rostrum camera and the cost is £45.00 per artwork

Actual price shown - no VAT to add.
Setup Artwork (small) - up to A4 £35.00 per original
Setup Artwork (large) - up to A1 £45.00 per original
Setup Digital file supplied £10.00 per file *see note below
Setup Photographic original £20.00 (same price whether from original negative, slide or print)
Prints cost: Paper/Canvas same price. Price is for paper/canvas size, not print area.
Quantity A4 prints A3 prints A2 prints A1 prints
1 to 10 £11.50 each £17.25 each £28.75 each £50.00 each
10 to 20 £9.25 each £13.80 each £23.00 each £40.00 each
Longer editioning runs attract an extra 10% discount
Stretching canvas prints onto stretcher bars £30 each irrespective of size.

Therefore...

Lets say you have an A4 artwork and want same-size giclée prints from it. Since it's under A4 size we would scan it directly, set up the digital file and make the prints. So the costs would be: £35.00 to scan and set up the file. This would also give you one A5 proof print. Prints cost £11.50 per A4 print made. If you want five prints, the total cost would be £92.50.

If your original artwork was over A4, we would make a digital photograph of the artwork first using a high resolution camera. If you wanted four A2-size prints, the costs would be £45.00 (setup) plus £115 (4 x A2 prints) equals £160.00.

Hopefully you will sell your giclée prints and will need more. Reprints from files we have scanned and set up do not incur a further setup fee. Therefore the costs are only for the prints you re-order.

Retouching and colour manipulation by quotation.

We can also print directly from your digital files, in which case the setup fee reduces to £10.00. This would include work scanned by other sources and from digital camera files. Send your files to us on CD, saved as Tiff files and in the Adobe RGB colour space. Big files are a must - the bigger, the better. Contact us to discuss further.

* If you supply a digital file we cannot guarantee the accuracy of the colour reproduction. This is because whilst our system is colour managed, the system that made your file may not be. Therefore if we haven't seen the original, we have no idea what the correct colour should be, and can therefore only make a straight print from your file, which may or may not match the colour of the original scene. However this should be apparent in the proof. If we make full size prints from your files and then you don't like the colours, we will redo them for you. However, we reserve the right to charge a minimum of 50% of the list price to cover time and materials etc.