Fine Art printing and inks

Fine Art printing (also called giclée, particularly in the English-speaking world) almost always means inkjet printing on art paper or canvas, using pigment inks on a photo printer with an extended ink set. There is, however, no legal definition and no standard that says what may be called Fine Art. Whenever you look at an offer, it is worth asking three things: which ink, on which paper, and with which profile.

How an inkjet print is made

An inkjet photo printer lays tiny droplets of ink on the paper. A single pixel of the image file is built on paper from many droplets of different colours and sizes. Professional printers do not work with just the four CMYK inks: they add lighter shades (light cyan, light magenta), several levels of grey and two different blacks. Photo black is meant for glossy and semi-matt papers; matte black is for matt Fine Art papers, on which photo black would look grey.

More shades of grey mean smoother gradations and more neutral black-and-white prints. More saturated inks widen the range of colours the printer can reproduce.

Pigment or dye

Inks are divided by how they carry colour.

	Pigment ink	Dye ink
What is inside	insoluble colourant particles suspended in liquid	colourant dissolved in liquid
Where it ends up	particles are trapped near the surface of the receiving layer	soaks deeper into the layer
Light fastness	generally higher	generally lower, and more sensitive to ozone
Look on glossy paper	bronzing or uneven gloss can appear	smooth, even gloss
Typical use	Fine Art, exhibitions, prints for sale, archives	home printing, short-lived prints

The difference is not black and white. Actual permanence depends on the combination of ink, paper and the conditions in which the print hangs. That is why paper manufacturers state compatibility with both types of ink, though the results differ.

Fine Art versus an ordinary lab print

Ordinary photographs from a minilab are still often made by the chromogenic process: light-sensitive paper is exposed with light (a laser or LEDs) and then developed in chemical baths. The result is a print on RC paper, that is, paper sealed in polyethylene. Inkjet minilabs also exist, and media manufacturers offer their own papers for them.

Fine Art printing differs mainly in:

• the medium: cotton, α-cellulose or baryta paper, or canvas; manufacturers commonly declare conformity with the paper permanence standard ISO 9706,
• the inks: usually pigment sets with several blacks and greys,
• the preparation: printing with an ICC profile for the specific paper, often with soft proofing and a test print as well.

When Fine Art printing is worth it

• the photograph is meant to hang for years, or to be sold or given as a keepsake,
• you want a matt surface without reflections and with a texture you can feel,
• you are printing black and white and care about a neutral tone and deep blacks,
• you are printing a reproduction of a painting, drawing or print.

For an album, a calendar or a picture for the fridge, a chromogenic print or ordinary inkjet print is perfectly fine.

How to prepare the file

1. Pixel dimensions: work out how large a print the file can take. The print size calculator will help.
2. Colour space: embed a profile in the file (sRGB or Adobe RGB). A file without a profile is usually treated as sRGB. More in ICC profiles and colour spaces.
3. Screen brightness: if you edit on a screen that is too bright, the print will come out darker. See the Colour check.
4. Sharpening: sharpen only at the final size and for the paper; matt papers take slightly more sharpening than glossy ones.
5. Border: Fine Art prints are often made with a white border, which helps with handling and with mounting behind a window mount.