What is Giclee?
There are important steps you can take to insure your files make the best possible giclee prints. Following these guidelines will determine how detailed color and brightness will be.
We assume you have Photoshop as it is the standard for digital image editing. Please set your working space to Adobe RGB (1998).
No matter if you are in a different color space, we do convert to Adobe RGB. If you have a camere or scanner that uses sRGB as the default color space, try to change the setting if possible. sRGB is a pretty mediocre profile.
Check the image histogram before uploading for your giclee order. Make sure there is no "clipping" on the left (shadows) and right (highlights).
If so, the resulting giclee will have blown highlights and blocked shadows. On the other hand, "dead" space on the left and right will lead to flat, low contrast giclees.
This can easily be corrected by putting the sliders where the information starts.
Make sure resolution is 150 PPI or higher. Do not be confused: PPI is not DPI and one dot does not equal one pixel. One pixel carries information to make many dots depending on the file specifications.
How we print
We print at 1,440 DPI as 720 DPI is not a satisfactory print resolution for giclee. This will create the best print, without any gradation issues.
Uploading high quaity JPEGs is fine. Set the saving option in Photoshop to 10 or 12. After many tests, we have seen virtually no difference between a high quality JPEG and a TIF.
One notable exception is when subtle gradations with varying color are present; in this case it is best to upload a psd or tif file. If the files are in native 16 bit, please leave them as such, without converting to 8 bit.
Again, the 16 bit color depth is not necessary unless there is a lot of color detail and smooth papers (especially photo coated papers) are used.