Giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") is a name for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray". The name has come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in art galleries to denote such prints.
The word “giclée,” as a fine art term, is associated with prints using fade-resistant "archival" inks and the inkjet printers. These printers use a color process that have multiple cartridges for variations of each color based on the CcMmYK color model (e.g. light cyan and light magenta inks in addition to regular cyan and magenta); this increases the resolution and color gamut and allows smoother gradient transitions.
Artists tend to use these types of inkjet printing processes to make reproductions of their original artwork. Professionally produced inkjet prints are much more expensive on a “per print” basis than the traditional four color offset lithography process originally used to make such reproductions.
