Choosing Giclee Prints or Lithographs

Way before starting FinerWorks, one of the areas of printing I researched for myself for my digital artwork was different ways to offer prints to my buyers. I recall talking to an artist in my hometown wanting know what he was doing for prints. He laughed and said that he had ordered several limited edition runs of his artwork and except for those he sold on occasion they were sitting in his studio taking up a lot of space. He figured at the rate he was going, I think selling one or two prints a week. He should have them all sold within a couple decades. I don’t remember the exact figure he said but know it was in a staggering figure and in the thousands of dollars for all the prints but the each print was actually quite reasonable when you calculated it on a per print cost. 

Initially I had a hard time getting my mind around the thought of spending that much money for printing so contacted a handful of companies to get some price quotes. The bottom line was in order to due any sort of lithograph prints it was not going to be make sense to do unless I was going to order about a thousand prints based upon what I was looking at in the final printed size. I dismissed this as an option fairly quickly which is one of the reasons I started to get into digital inkjet printing which finally led to professional giclee production.

If you have been printing your work for a while now, you might have experienced a similar story and have researched both options. However, a lot of people are just starting to learn more about giclee printing and research both options. If you are just getting started, we just posted a new page about the differences between lithograph prints vs giclee prints. Even though FinerWorks is a giclee printer, we tried to be as unbiased as to which option is better. In my option, I think the giclee option makes more sense for those just starting or those looking to offer a higher end print but printing lithograph prints does also have some valid advantages as well. My suggestion is to read the page below and form your own opinion.

FinerWorks: Giclees vs Lithograph Prints