News and Frequently Asked Questions

This page is aimed at answering some of your questions about the printing process that we use, and to help you with any colour management issues you may have.
The colour management process is, in its essence, an exact science and can be quite a daunting subject to understand (let alone get right), but if you follow a few simple steps, then you can achieve predictable and reliable results (and if you get into trouble - give us a call, we're here to help!)

Colour Management
We have put together some very useful "How To" guides, outlining a basic colour-management workflow for you to implement when viewing and editing your images. As there is a lot of information within these guides, they are too big to display here, so they are available as free PDF's for you to follow in your own time. Click here to email us your request, and we will email them directly to you.
If you need more help setting up your colour-management workflow then we do offer an on-site service to help you through the set-up. For more information on this service, please see the "Offers" page.

Image courtesy of K Dobson
printed and framed by PrintYours

Workflow Set-up
We would always suggest that you use a specific Colour Workspace in your image workflow, and the usual choices are either Adobe RGB, or sRGB (we accept files with either of these profiles embedded.) Although the Adobe RGB colour space is larger than the sRGB colour space, this is only useful to you if your printer is capable of reproducing these colours. If, for example, you have a six or eight colour printer at home, then it is unlikely that you will be able to reproduce all the colours that you see in an Adobe RGB file, especially if you have vivid reds, blues or greens.
At PrintYours we use the latest 12 colour pigment ink technology, to ensure that these vivid colours are reproduced, and follow a strict colour-managed workflow to ensure that these colours are printed successfully.

Image size - Resolutions for printing - suggestions
To order your prints we ask you to send your images as 300 dpi "TIFF" of "JPEG" files at 100% of your required print size. Although this is the optimum printing resolution to guarantee excellent quality, we are able to print file with a resolution as low as 72 dpi and anything in between, as long as you are happy with the original file.
The problem with using a file with this low resolution would be if the image needed resizing to a bigger size, as there would not be enough information (pixel-data) in the image to do it successfully. So, we always recommended that you have more pixels in your image from the very beginning, giving us more data to work with when printing.

If you already have a full colour-managed workflow in place, we can also email you the specific ICC profiles for the different types of media that we use.

About Giclée Printing
Definition: Giclée (jee-klay) - The French word "giclée" is a feminine noun that means a spray or a spurt of liquid. The word may have been derived from the French verb "gicler" meaning "to squirt".

Reference : The term Giclée Print is used for images which are generated from high resolution digital images and printed with archival quality inks onto various substrates including canvas, fine art, and photo-based paper. The giclée printing process provides better colour accuracy than other means of reproduction.

Process: Giclée prints are created by PrintYours using professional 12-Colour ink-jet printers and pigment-based inks. These state-of-the-art printers are capable of producing incredibly detailed prints for both the fine art and photographic markets. The quality of a giclée print rivals traditional silver-halide and gelatin printing processes and is commonly found in museums, art galleries, and photographic galleries.

Longevity: The term "pigment print" is used generally for any type of printed image that uses strictly pigments. Pigment printing processes have been utilised since the middle of the 19th century. The image stability of pigment printing is superior to that of any other method of printing, including traditional silver-halide or metal-based.

Where archival dye-based ink sets exhibit excellent colour gamut, pigment inks excel in permanence. A dye is molecularly soluble in its vehicle, but pigment is not. Pigment particles tend to be large enough to embed into the receiving substrate making them water-resistant. The particulate nature of pigment inks ensures their archival superiority. A particle of pigment is less susceptible to destructive environmental elements than a dye molecule.

Giclée prints are sometimes mistakenly referred to as Iris prints, which are 4-Colour ink-jet prints from a printer pioneered in the late 1970s by Iris Graphics.