Thinking about selling or exhibiting reproductions of your work, but not sure where to start? This article explains the difference between self-printing and outsourcing, and offers helpful tips for printers and printing services.

In order to print artwork for exhibitions or for sale on the Internet, you must be able to achieve the quality of a product called "giclée". This term is based on the French word gicleur, a French technical term for a jet or nozzle. In short, an inkjet printer is required to print giclée.

This article will discuss suitable printers, but since giclée printers are quite expensive to buy, operate and maintain, it will also discuss the possibilities that can be achieved on a small budget and provide some advice on outsourcing. However, you should always choose the highest quality you can afford, if only because your art should make you money and not ruin your reputation.

Today giclée is associated with inkjet equipment, which uses archival dye or pigment based inks and archival media, also known as substrates. The main suppliers of this equipment in the product portfolio are Canon, Epson and HP. Only printers that can print on A2 media (24 "x 20" or larger) provide the required quality.

An office printer won't work, mainly because you can't linearize it and manage color correctly. A photo printer that prints A3 (or 16 "x 12" paper) is fine - if you're willing to compromise on paper size and, to some extent, quality.

In short, you need:

highest print quality you can afford - for example, when specifications mention 3.5 picoliter ink droplet size, that's enough to deliver very high resolution.
highest print resolution available at maximum ink - for example, 2400 x 1200 dpi and six to ten inks.
ink that guarantees high lightfastness (the degree to which color inks are not affected by light over time) and archival quality (fastness).
a device that can print on a wide variety of materials, including cotton rag, glossy photo paper, satin paper, matte paper, canvas, film, vinyl, textiles, etc.

Difference between home printing and professional printing

All high-end devices are PostScript printers by definition and are best controlled by the RIP, which is an application that lets you control how ink is fed from each individual printhead to the media. This is important because:

This saves money as you can control the amount of ink sprayed onto the media.
Improves quality beyond what is possible with the printer driver.
Provides very accurate color reproduction
On some printers, this allows you to increase the length of the printable area, again saving money.

All of these printers need to be calibrated (or linearized) before creating color profiles for the media you intend to use. This is the most important step in the process as it brings the printer to a known and stable state for each particular ink / media combination.

These preparatory steps are inherent in professional printing, regardless of the type of printer you are using or the professional to whom you are submitting the print job.

If you are just starting out or are on a tight budget, you probably want to use a photo printer to print your artwork, but it is still recommended to use RIP. Only if you are working on a near-zero budget can you use a printer driver from the printer manufacturer. However, you will have to give up on quality and especially on control. It is okay if you are aware of this and will not use the resulting prints for any important exhibition. Then it may be best if your art is printed on a print-on-demand service or even on a local printer.

Print for yourself

When printing illustrations, you should ideally work in the CMYK color space because you cannot rely on printer drivers and manufacturer's color profiles to achieve accurate color reproduction and complete control over the ink on the media. This means that you will need to invest a little money in a good genuine RIP. There are also pseudo-RIPs, but they depend on the printer driver and are not useful. A relatively inexpensive but decent and user-friendly RIP is EFI's Fiery RIP, which many manufacturers use in their mass production machines. Other RIPs are usually much more difficult to use than the EFI Fiery.

The printer you will want to buy for trade show printing is a large format inkjet printer.

A printer / RIP combo will set you back between $ 1,300 and $ 11,000, depending on print size, resolution, and device capabilities - for example, some printers come with a paper cutter.

Using your own printer implies that you will have to service the printer yourself. Setting up a printer in CMYK mode involves linearizing the printer and creating print / color profiles for every other media you choose to print on. You will need to repeat this process with every new batch of ink and media you buy.

When you are just starting out, are on a tight budget, or are still struggling, you must keep this in mind.

For true exhibition quality, you will also need to purchase a spectrophotometer. Currently, only the professional X-Rite i1Pro is available.

If you're just starting out or are on a tight budget, you can use the Datacolor kit. This won't provide the same accuracy as the X-Rite, but it will be cheaper. If you have the money to spare, invest in the X-Rite i1iO, a robotic automatic card reader designed for photographers, designers and printers looking to get rid of manual strip swiping. The I1iO gets the job done in minutes, whereas reading strips manually can be very frustrating and take forever.

If you also want to print your art on mugs, clothing, and other 3D products, you can buy a heat press (take a look at this Amazon page for example), but they are cumbersome and tedious to use. For this type of printing, it is probably best to outsource the work.

Outsourcing the printing process

As an aspiring artist or when you're on a tight budget, you may want to consider outsourcing your printing to a print-on-demand (POD) service provider. You don't need to invest in hardware, you don't need to learn how to operate a professional printer, and you can still get good quality for a slightly higher price per print than doing it yourself. However, to showcase your work at important art exhibitions, I would advise against using POD services as it becomes really important to control the entire process.

When renting a POD service such as Printify and Kyte.li, you provide the files in a print-ready format according to the printer's specifications, and they print your illustrations. You can then sell your print materials online using a range of e-commerce service providers.

The initial workflow with POD Service is very close to that of a professional printer, which is another alternative if you find someone knowledgeable and helpful. However, it will be more expensive to get help from a local printer, but depending on the availability of the printer, you will be able to instruct the operator of the press during check / print.

Some online art selling services run their own printers or outsource parts of their own for printing. For example, Society6 executes, prints and ships your orders all over the world. Not only do they print on sheets of paper, textiles, and canvas, they also print on 3D objects like mugs and iPhone cases.

A basic introduction to different types of printing

What types of printers are there for printing artwork?

Large format inkjet. It uses printheads with tiny nozzles. When energized, the nozzles spray a microscopically small drop of ink onto the substrate. Printers that can handle 24-inch media are called wide-format printers.

Small photo and office inkjet printers are inkjet printers, but they have too few nozzles, no advanced drip technology, and generally are not suitable for RIP control. They are not very good at printing illustrations, except for lower quality prints.

Large photo printers differ from small photo printers in size and quality. As the size increases, so does the price of equipment, and it becomes profitable for manufacturers to include more features.

Most UV curing inkjet printers are inkjet printers again, but these are massive industrial presses that fix the ink onto the media by "curing" with UV light. They are great for signage, banners, and large panels.

A dye sublimation printer uses solid ink that must be heated before being applied to the substrate. After drying, the ink has a little wax and remains permanent. These printers can be used to print on mugs, clothing and metal.

Color laser printers are extremely difficult to manage color and RIP is not available for them. Colored toner is not fast or lightfast. Laser printers can only handle paper.

Hot press machines are not printers by themselves. They are used to apply heat transfer (colored sheets of synthetic resin or plastic such as vinyl) to clothing, mugs, and glasses using temperature and pressure.

Printer recommendations

The Epson A2 model, SureColor SC-P800, features a 3.5 picoliter minimum ink droplet size and adjustable droplet technology that produces up to three different sized droplets per line at very high resolution.

The HP DesignJet Z9 has an optimized resolution of 2400 x 1200 dpi and uses nine inks (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Matte Black, Photo Black, Chromatic Red, Chromatic Green, Chromatic Blue, and Gray) with gloss enhancer options.

For budding artists on a tight budget, the Canon A3 + Pixma Pro-100S Mk II offers a good 4800 x 1200 dpi high resolution printer with eight colors and ChromaLife100 ink for around $ 500. For this price, you also get ink durability and the ability to RIP the printer. However, even with RIP, you will not be able to print on media that is outside the printer's specifications, as you would with other printers, but this is a minor drawback.

What to look for when it comes to your printing supplier and how to check print quality

Before entrusting your work to a print provider, you should familiarize yourself with the user experience by doing a Google search and viewing comments about their services. If that suits you, send them a test file, preferably one that will give you an idea of the color accuracy and the quality of the lines (such as roughness) that they can output.

Look for registration errors - this is when you see edges with mismatched colors. If they are, it means that the equipment is either in poor condition, or it is old, or the operators do not know their work. For mugs and other 3D objects, test the ink's resistance to abrasives, detergents and scratches.

Make sure your art is print-ready

Output the image at 300 dpi or higher (300 dpi is giclée quality) or as instructed by your printer or POD service.

Bitmap images (JPEG, TIFF, PNG) are composed of pixels and cannot be enlarged without adding pixels. The vector graphics can be resized as desired.

If you save the file in vector format, you can export it to a bitmap file of exactly the size you want, in a format such as TIFF, and repeat this for other sizes later - TIFF is what most printers can print.

When printing using RIP, convert your images to CMYK and check if the conversion settings are correct. You should always check your very first print - a proof - for color accuracy. If you are using a printer, you will need to print a check strip in the margin and check it on a spectrophotometer. You will also need to check the density of the ink, again using a spectrophotometer (or special density meter).

When working with a POD service or vendor or local print shop, you must match the color for your artwork using the color profile of the printing device they will use to output your file, and then use the color management features of your software to correct the color shifts.

Common factors that prevent a file from being ready for printing include:

The file is not in the correct format.
The document size is incorrect.
Colors are set to the wrong color space; for example RGB instead of CMYK.
Errors related to fields.
The resolution is not high enough.