What advantage does giclee have over traditional photosensitive print making?

Question

I'm trying to figure out why I would want to print giclee.

Let me set some background. I'm a gallery represented artist entering my third season. My sales are good. I print with Bay Photo (via SmugMug) and I'm quite happy with the service and print quality. I print mostly glossy or on metallic paper (using the Kodak Endura paper) and I've dabbled a bit with their "print on metal" service. (Gorgeous but expensive.)

So an photographer friend of mine is looking into giclee. Now I know what it is, I know the history of it (indeed, I'm a software engineer with a background in color science and there is a decent chance that the early Iris printers had some of my code in them, at least in the pre-press arena) but I'm surprised when I see the pricing of traditional photo sensitive paper printing vs giclee.

what advantage does giclee have over traditional photosensitive print making? From smugmug.com, I see an 11x14 is $7.95 on glossy or metallic paper, but $44.20 for a giclee watercolor.

Now I understand perfectly that giclee can make it easy to go large, but a 30x40" glossy is only $66 while a 30x40" giclee is $178.50. So there's no advantage there.

One possible advantage is of course, paper, giclee lets you put your ink down on all sorts of surfaces.

So, aside from paper choice, what advantage does giclee have over traditional photosensitive print making?

Answer

Stan's answer about the archival qualities of a [giclee | inkjet] print (and I won't get into the semantics between the two words) is right on. Inkjet-printed images can be of far greater longevity, considering color-fastness and substrate color constant. This is all a long way of saying, if you are trying to sell something that will last a lifetime, Inkjet/Giclee is a better bet than a Type-R or Type-C print.

The other interesting advantage of using the inkjet technology is that you can apply it to far more surfaces that it would be practical to apply traditional photo-process to. People take it for granted now that they can get prints on canvas and prints on acetate and prints on art paper, etc. That wasn't the case 20 years ago. If you want to see some really fine examples of Giclee printing, track down some by Nash Editions (Graham Nash's company). They really are in a league of their own and their black & white images are particularly compelling.

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How to photograph artwork for giclée prints

Question

I'd like to photograph some paintings so that the photos can be used to make giclée prints. Any tips to getting the truest color? I heard that with regular film, a long exposure gives you the truest color. However, I think I read somewhere (can't remember where) that in digital, long exposures actually can give you less-than-true color. Anything else I should keep in mind?

Also — these paintings are NOT behind glass. They are currently unframed. Most of what I've seen on the web has been advice for paintings that are behind glass. Thanks in advance!

Answer

To photograph artwork, you'll need as flat and uniform a lighting setup as possible. Ideally, four lights from each corner to minimize any variation. You should use an incident meter to verify that the the light varies by no more than 1/4 stop across the artwork.

You don't need to use softboxes - bare bulbs are sufficient, if placed far enough away to minimize falloff. Minor differences due to age and color of softboxes can result in varying color temperature across your scene. This is less likely with bare bulbs. Make sure that the flash tubes are not too different - you can test this by shooting images of a grey card illuminated with each light, in turn. You should have a white balance temperature variation no greater than 150-200K, 100K if you're lucky.

Once you have the lighting set up, use a Gretag Macbeth color checker to obtain a reference color image, which you can use to profile your camera for the specific lighting setup.

Export images to 16-bit TIFF and Adobe 1998 color space - this should be more than enough for clients.

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