Kevin Rich, President of Hunter Editions

Look closely at what the driving force behind improvements in almost any industry and you will come up with the same answer, meeting customers’ expectations. Customers demand improved quality and innovation in the products they buy. In Giclée printmaking that means a combination of many different elements. Higher visual print quality, more faithful color rendition, greater color gamut, higher degrees of repeatability, plus more attractive and pleasing media choices, all accomplished along with ever increasing archival qualities. It is a tall order to fill but incrementally that is just what has been going on behind the scenes for years, leading up to the quality and consistency for the prints we enjoy today. There is a world of difference between the early, largely fugitive prints that were produced by the earliest pioneers of the Giclée process and those being produced today. Nobody intended for the prints they made to fade but fade they did, disappointing customers and frustrating printmakers. Some very painful lessons were learned and creative solutions were engineered to overcome the shortcomings in the process. After all was said and done, the prints themselves were beautiful - almost works of art in their own right - and most certainly not anything the early innovators would give up on over a little problem with light fastness.

The goal of artists and printers has always been better visual quality, while the requirement of collectors was a long lasting, non-fading reproduction. Satisfying these needs has lead to an ongoing series of improvements in the materials and technology used in the making of fine art prints.

A push to improve inks came first, as a response to the fading issue. The inks themselves were dye based for two very important reasons. They worked with the print technology available at the time, and dyes are inherently brighter than pigments giving them an edge in color reproduction. Unfortunately, they are also less stable than pigments, giving pigments the edge in archival qualities. Improved dye formulations gradually increased their fade resistance, but the biggest improvements were made once the relationship between inks and the media they were used on was realized. Different combinations produced different results, and one had to be careful what combinations worked together. This uncertainty and the resulting reputation for fading was difficult for the industry to overcome and to some degree it still persists today.

The introduction of drop on demand inkjet technology opened the doors to practical applications for pigment based inks. This type of printer has become the workhorse of the industry today and is well represented by offerings from several different manufacturers. Achieving the quality available today required hand in hand development of inks and papers, designed to work together as a system. Compatibility between ink and paper is still an issue, but it is available across a broad variety of media developed for this purpose. As pigments were made finer and purer, color improved and droplet sizes became smaller. Printer manufacturers engineered new printheads that could control the ever finer droplet sizes more accurately, pushing resolution skyward. Paper manufacturers responded by creating improved surfaces and ink receptive coatings that could support the resolution and ink loading the printers were capable of delivering. We now enjoy working with a wide range of proven, reliable materials with which to practice our craft. Today’s inks offer improved color gamut and light fastness imparting both beauty and longevity to the print. Modern ink jet printers are now capable of reproducing images at higher resolutions than their recent predecessors, improving print quality. The printheads can control the size, quantity and placement of ink droplets with extreme accuracy, allowing printmakers to leverage that into the quality equation. Fine art papers have vastly improved their ink receptive and dot-holding qualities, providing the ability to produce prints with a greater dynamic range and increased shadow detail. Six color, seven color and greater ink sets improve highlight detail, color balance and gradations. The materials have largely caught up to the demands made of them, but improvements continue to be made.

When most people consider what is involved in Giclée printing, they think of three things: ink, paper, and the machines that put the two together. This is largely accurate, but there are a lot of “behind the scenes” factors contributing to the quality of fine art prints. Quite a bit of activity happens in the reproduction process before ink ever touches paper. Every Giclée reproduction begins with an original work of art which must be captured and digitized. Traditionally, an artist would bring their work to a photographer to have a transparency made. That transparency would then be scanned to convert it into a high resolution digital file. All of the shortcomings in the transparency were now an integral part of the process. Only the characteristics of the original that the film is capable of capturing are available to the scanner. On top of this the characteristics of the film itself (grain, sharpness, color casts) are now part of the image. Each step in the process removes the final print a generation away from the original work. Even with these shortcomings very good results have been achieved for years using these methods. The introduction of high resolution 4x5 digital cameras improved the quality of the final print by improving the quality of the initial capture. Providing photographers and printers the ability to directly capture original art as a digital file eliminates all of the shortcomings of working from film, plus adding the bonus of removing a generation from the reproduction. Before it was original to film, film to scan, scan to digital file. Now it is shortened to: original to digital file. Further development of the sensors and converters in digital cameras has pushed their capabilities ahead, expanding the color accuracy and resolution beyond that of film. The downside is that the size and resolution of these files can create enormous demands for computer processing power and storage.

Fortunately for us computer processing power has kept pace with the demand, doubling about every 10 months. Computers have become not only faster but their capacity for memory has increased making it easier to handle the file sizes necessary for high quality large format printing. Multiple gigabyte drives are common now, making storage affordable. High capacity DVD’s make long term archiving of finished work a far less cumbersome task than it was back in the days of high capacity tape drive storage.

Less glamorous than the shiny new hardware we use but equally important to the process is the software used to manipulate and process the images for printing. Better machines are only part of the digital quality story, the other half is how they are controlled by software. Color management systems started as proprietary systems. They were very limited in their scope and the resulting files weren’t easily compatible with other software. In recent years standard formats have been adopted for creating color profiles, enabling the same color information to be used not only among different software packages but across computer platforms too. Now products from a variety of vendors allow printmakers to accurately profile their inks and papers and characterize their cameras and printers to make color reproduction much more predictable and accurate. All this goes on in the background invisibly, but contributes greatly to quality.

Inkjet printers are remarkable examples of engineering. But to make use of their capabilities very sophisticated software is required. Each manufacturer ships basic software with their printer that will enable almost anyone to get it to make a print, but the degree of control and quality is lacking for the fine art market. Print drivers are often constrained in their capabilities to keep the output well within the limits of the printer to avoid problems. This is where the need for more sophisticated Rip (raster image processing) software comes in. A number of decisions have to be made in software before each droplet of ink hits the paper. Size, color, density, position, dithering pattern, resolution are all determined to place each ink droplet on the print. Consider that millions of ink droplets are being laid down every second, in six, seven eight or more colors and you start to get the idea just how demanding this process is. Then factor in that the process has to be tailored to the characteristics of each ink/media combination and the need for better software to run the printer becomes obvious. These dedicated Rip packages provide the control and ability to fine-tune the output to get the best quality prints that the machines are capable of producing.

A less obvious contributor to the increasing quality of Giclée printing involves the growth of the industry itself. Twelve to fifteen years ago there were only a handful of companies providing printing services at this level of quality, resulting in the fact that all of the innovative thinking came from a small pool of people who were working in the industry. Today Giclée printmaker numbers are much greater, and there are many hundreds of people involved, translating into much more innovation and shared experience being applied to further the cause of improved quality. Giclée printmaking has become a very competitive business, and that competition spurs innovation.

Growth of Giclée printmaking as an industry has also meant that now the market for ink, paper and software manufacturers is much larger, creating the potential for greater profit. This in turn helps justify the capital expenditure in research and development for new and better products to sell into the marker, benefiting us all. New products appear regularly, giving our customers expanding choices of how to present their reproductions. Now papers, fabrics, canvas, tin, and ceramics are options we see people choosing for their work. New types of inks allow high quality imaging on rigid surfaces and even claim durability fit for displaying art outdoors.

In the end, it all comes back down to our customers needs. Innovation is never the result when everyone is perfectly happy with what they currently have. There’s always the next idea, the next experiment, the “If we can do this, why not that?” approach to creative thinking that moves things forward. Our customers are more directly involved in the Giclée process than they are in many other industries. They are better educated; more technically enlightened than ever before, and demand better products to offer their collectors and galleries. Since our customers are largely artists they are highly creative and naturally innovative in their approach to problem solving, supplying a constant stream of new ideas for ways to reproduce their artwork. The quality of Giclée printing has grown to meet the increasing demands of the marketplace, and continues to do so.

Article Appeared in art industry trade publication, Art World News

Kevin Rich
Owner
Hunter Editions