23 August 2026

Giclée vs C-Type: Choosing a Fine-Art Print

What giclée and C-type actually mean, which suits which photograph, and how to size a print for your wall — the guide I wish print shops gave you.

Black-and-white panorama of a snow-covered mountain ridge streaked with dark rock, fog closing over the summits and still grey water below.

Every print I sell is made one of two ways, and the difference is worth two minutes of your time before you buy anything — from me or anyone else.

Giclée: pigment on cotton

A giclée print is pigment ink laid onto archival paper — usually a cotton-rag or alpha-cellulose stock like Hahnemühle Photo Rag. Pigment particles sit in the paper's coating and stay put: independent ratings put their display life beyond a hundred years.

The real reason to choose giclée, though, is texture. Matte cotton papers have a surface — a soft tooth that turns deep blacks velvety and gives monochrome work physical presence. My low-key animal portraits — the Icelandic horse against black, the nyala from darkness — are proofed for exactly this kind of paper. The black isn't glossy ink; it's a surface you want to touch and shouldn't.

C-type: a true photographic print

A C-type (chromogenic) print is exposed onto light-sensitive photographic paper with lasers, then chemically developed — the same silver-halide process as a darkroom print, driven digitally. Tones are continuous in a way even excellent inkjets only approximate, and the gloss and metallic-adjacent papers give colour work a depth that suits dense, luminous scenes: city light trails, Vivid Sydney, water at dawn.

The honest decision rule

Monochrome, low-key, texture-forward work → giclée on matte cotton.
Saturated colour, night cities, luminous water → C-type on gloss, or giclée on a baryta (semi-gloss) paper as the each-way bet.
Living with direct sun on the wall → giclée, and glass with UV filtering regardless.

Sizing without regret

Prints disappoint in one direction only: too small. Measure the wall, apply the two-thirds rule (artwork ≈ two-thirds the width of the furniture beneath it), and when torn between two sizes, take the larger. A 5472-pixel master prints cleanly past A2, so the files are never the constraint on any size I offer.

Paper stocks, sizes and shipping for every print in the shop are on the print information page.

Questions, answered

What does giclée actually mean?

A giclée print is made on a professional pigment-ink inkjet printer onto archival fine-art paper. Pigment inks on cotton-rag papers are rated to last a century or more without visible fading under normal display conditions.

Which lasts longer, giclée or C-type?

Pigment giclée prints have the longer archival rating. C-type prints are genuine photographic prints with superb continuous tone, but their dyes are rated to decades rather than a century.

What size print should I buy for above a sofa?

A reliable rule: the artwork (or framed piece) should span roughly two-thirds of the sofa's width, hung so its centre sits about 145–150cm from the floor. For most sofas that means a 75–100cm-wide print.

Why are your prints made to order?

Each print is produced when you order it, by a professional lab, on the paper the photograph was proofed for. No inventory means no stock-aged prints — and it's why made-to-order prints are exempt from change-of-mind returns while still being fully covered for any damage or fault.