Tundra Graphics

What Is (or Isn't) Good Enough? Part 1

A recent exchange of reader comments on Beyond the Scanned Image: Assessing Scholarly Uses of Digital Collections has gotten me thinking once again about the general notion of just "what is good enough." Voltaire's roughly translated, "best is the enemy of the good," has in recent years been ecstatically appropriated by such initiatives as the Google Books mass digitization initiative and the "rapid capture" movement among archives. As the actual production results of these decisions have come into sharper focus, digital archives practitioners and researchers like Paul Conway have started to more critically ask, what are the actual ramifications of putting speed and outsourcing at the absolute forefront of our decision making? Or more acutely, what are the results of that which isn't good enough?

Peter Leonard’s recent work on The Chicagoan’s cover design trends over time (starting at 16:14) is a unique case of the importance of "accurate" digital imaging. Traditionally, color and tone-accurate imaging has held tangible importance for such outputs as print and web production. Museums want high quality and accurate exhibit catalogs for their patrons. Archives and other memory institutions are charged with the preservation (both analog and digital) of their collections from the ravages of both physical and digital decay. Decay leads to a compromised, distorted representation of the original object. This can take such common forms as the physical brittle book, or overly compressed, blurred and/or color inaccurate digital image. In this last instance, color inaccuracy can actually skew the research results of such digital humanists as Leonard who are beginning to treat digital still images as large aggregate data sets that are ripe for novel research methods. In Leonard's case, he was interested in the discrete data points of hue and saturation in the magazine cover images that he was analyzing.  Inaccurate original digital capture of these covers could naturally lead to random variance of these metrics and compromised research conclusions.

Capture accuracy in the digital realm is a product of thoughtful workflow planning and proportioned follow-up quality control.  What can occur when such planning and control are either ignored, overly rushed, and/or blindly outsourced?  That will be the topic of Part 2...

Scanning 50-Year-Old Ektachrome: Technical Observations on Personal Digital Archiving, Part 1

Of late I've been scanning a number of roughly 50-year-old family photographs that were originally shot with Kodak Ektachrome slide film. Most of these slides date from 1962 through 1968 and most employed flash lighting. It is my guess, based upon vague visual memories from the time, that they were most likely shot with an inexpensive Kodak Instamatic camera, probably a 104 with flashcubes. The Instamatics had slow shutter speeds, used poor quality, fixed-focus plastic lenses, but were able to take the then new Kodapak 126 cartridges loaded with film stock like Ektachrome and Kodachrome. The 126 magazine was a clever design that answered consumer complaints on the difficulties of loading and unloading regular roll film. With 126, you could just drop in the sealed cartridge and be up and running. Its asymmetrical design guaranteed that you couldn't load it wrong. Here is a great Kodak promo of the combination from the era. So, grooovy!

For both this family archive, mostly shot by my parents, and my own personal 35mm negative film archive from the 1980s-1990s, I use a relatively novel digital conversion workflow that employs an Epson Perfection V500 Photo Scanner, VueScan software, and linear DNG files imported into Adobe Lightroom. Generally speaking, here are some of the benefits that I see.

The Epson V500 is a great scanner for the money that uses contemporary LED lighting technology. LED is superior to the older Xenon gas cold cathode fluorescent lamps mainly because LED illumination is brighter and more even, which allows for the better extraction of a given film's shadow detail. With VueScan, you can choose among a number of film profiles to suit the media that you are scanning which is important for getting close to "good" color as a starting point. Absolute purists like medium and large format film artists who meticulously process one converted image at a time will argue for "raw" scans that simply capture the film as is (sometimes even including the IR channel data used in auto dust/scratch removal). Such raw scans are also possible with VueScan. However, when working with family photos in bulk quantities, this isn't a scalable option. In the particular case of my own color film days, 35mm negatives have an orange mask that needs to be accounted for through color-correction of some sort in order to realize good, baseline, positive color images.   A VueScan film profile helps to get you there without a complicated trip through Photoshop.

A clarification...  By "baseline" I mean something like "use-neutral."  "Use-neutral" is a term borrowed from the more stringent realm of the FADGI Technical Guidelines that we follow in the University of Connecticut Libraries' digital still imaging lab that I manage.  In the context of old family photos, I use the descriptor more in the narrative sense, without the inherent FADGI quality metrics strictly attached.  So, what I'm aiming for with these old family shots are baseline positive images that can be archived as-is and that then require only minimal post-processing tweaks for web, print, etc. as needed.  In essence, I want to be 90% of the way "there" as these images come off of the scanner.

Getting back to VueScan.  Another one of its favorable attributes is its ability to create .DNG files direct from the scanner.  Though these are, by virtue of scanner sensor design, linear (i.e. RGB-encoded vs. "raw" undemosaiced) and conform to the older DNG v.1.1 specification, the VueScan DNGs include the same basic embedded metadata tags as regular camera raw DNG files.  This singular schema is useful once both camera DNGs and scanner DNGs occupy the same digital asset management ecosystem like a Lightroom catalog.  In turn, most color/tone editing, descriptive metadata work such as Geo-referencing and keyword tagging, and final publishing (print or web) can mostly be done seamlessly under a single software roof for all of one's image archive.  In seeing the identical embedded tags from a homogeneous DNG collection, Lightroom will present uniform slider labels and scales for options like white balance adjustments between both scanner and camera images.  An additional scanner DNG attribute is that these files can be losslessly compressed according to the DNG specification's options.  So, for the same data that is contained in an uncompressed TIF, you can also enjoy a smaller storage footprint.  This is important particularly if one is scanning large volumes of images at a high sampling frequency, to a large color space, at 16 bit/channel.

More to come...

New Design, New Images

Been working on the new site design while battling a nasty cold that I picked up over the weekend. Koken, the CMS that I migrated Tundra Graphics to, is pretty great once you get it to play nice with your service provider's CPU and memory quotas.  Perhaps a short white paper on some of the technical issues that I ran into and the overall rationale behind the move would be worth the effort.  We'll see.

In the interim, a few of the newly uploaded images are featured as a slideshow on the homepage.  For better looks at these images, find them in their specific albums.  Feel free to poke around the site and let me know if you run into any problems or have any thoughts.  I've installed Disqus, so bang away there if you like.  I've allowed guest logins which are pretty painless.

The new architecture is particularly high res screen friendly, so hardware that offer HiDPI/Retina screens, which include the iPhone 4+, iPad 2+, MacBook Pro and more should fire up quality versions of these images.

Cheers.

New Tundra Graphics Web Design

At long last, I'm updating Tundra Graphics to a non-Flash architecture for better tablet and handheld usability. This new site will also allow me to add new image content more smoothly than before.  So, please feel free to check back in.  I have somewhat of a backlog of content that I hope to be posting shortly.