Giclée - commonly pronounced "zhee-clay," is an invented name for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The term is often used instead of Inkjet in art shops. The word “giclée”, from the French language word "gicleur" meaning "nozzle", was created by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print.

Giclée prints are advantageous to artists who do not find it feasible to mass produce their work, but want to reproduce their art as needed, or on-demand.  The artist does not need to pay for, market, and store large print runs.

Once an image is digitally archived, additional reproductions can be made with minimal effort and reasonable cost. The prohibitive up-front cost of mass production for an edition is eliminated.

Archived files will not deteriorate in quality as negatives and film inherently do.

Another tremendous advantage of giclée printing is that digital images can be reproduced to almost any size and onto various media, giving the artist the ability to customise prints for a specific client.