A Giclée is a scanned image printed on a high resolution, ink-jet printer. Giclée prints are advantageous to artists who find it not feasible to mass produce their work, but want to reproduce their art as needed. The prints are printed using dye base or pigment based inks on archival papers, canvas, poster stock or a number of other medias.

What is the quality of the Giclée reproduction method? Giclées are one of the finest reproduction methods available today. The depth of color far surpasses that of lithographs. Lithographs use the same process as printing a magazine. Also litho inks have dyes in them that are subject to fading. When an lithograph is printed on a rag paper the colors are lifeless and dull because much of the ink is absorbed into the paper. The "dot gain" causes the printed dot to expand into the adjoining dot, this muddies the color. A water color artist fights this when an opposite color will contaminate a color he is laying on his paper. To counter this problem printers may print on pulp made papers that have a coating. The coating minimizes the dot gain, but the acid in the paper yellows and attacks the ink over time. Giclée paper is much more substantial than lithograph prints. Digital Scanning and proofing allows for better color fidelity on a Giclée than lithographs. A proof can be printed in minutes on a Giclée printer but a color proof on a litho takes a day and hundreds of dollars for one proof. With a digital proofing you can isolate an object in the print, color correct and run a small proof in minutes. The artist can see the results of the corrections almost immediately.