Educating Consumers about Archival Photographic Printing in Kansas City

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For many artists and photographers, confusion exists about the terms archival photographic printing, fine art printing, and the word giclee. Here at Luke's Lab in Kansas City, all of these terms refer to the same thing! This is our specialty.

The word giclee, as a fine art term, has come to be associated with printing using fade-resistant archival inks and the inkjet printers that use them. Our method of archival photographic printing uses the Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black (CMYK) color process but often has multiple cartridges for variations of each color based on the CcMmYK color model (adding light magenta and light cyan inks to basic CMYK.)

Photographers and artists use these types of inkjet printing processes, also called archival photographic printing, to make reproductions of their original two-dimensional artwork, photographs or computer generated art. In the Kansas City metro area, many artists and photographers rely on the experience of Luke Letourneau at Luke's Lab as their source for highest-quality, archival photographic printing.

Why are professionally produced archival photographic printing (inkjet prints) more expensive on a "per print" basis than the traditional four-color offset lithography process? Litho was originally used to make such reproductions, but one had to print a run of, say, 1000 to get the cost per piece at a desirable price point. However, with these quantities there was always a storage issue. With the one-at-a-time method of archival photographic printing, the artist does not need to pay for and store large print runs. Since the photographer or artist can print and sell each print individually to match demand, archival photographic printing via inkjet is an economical alternative to producing large runs of four-color offset prints.

In addition, inkjet printing has the added advantage of allowing the artist to control every aspect of the image, its color and the substrate printed on. In Kansas City, partner with Luke's Lab and take advantage of Luke Letourneau's 25+ years in business, serving the 7-county Kansas City area.

Traditionally, archival science has involved time honored methods for preserving items and information in climate controlled storage facilities. This technique involved both the cataloguing items into a collection archive, their retrieval and safe handling. However, the advent of digital documents and items, along with the development of electronic databases has caused the field to evolve. While generally associated with museums and libraries, archival photographic printing also can pertain to individuals who maintain private art and photographic collections, or to the average person who seeks to collect and properly care for artwork and photographs.