• There is a tremendous variation in the weights and thicknesses of available substrates. The lightest paper we carry is Moab’s Japanese Washi Unryu translucent mulberry paper at 55 g/sm, while Hahnemühle’s Photo Rag 500 weighs in at, well, 500 g/sm — pretty much a heavy-duty cotton rag cardstock.
• The presence of (or lack thereof) of Optical Brightening Agents, or OBAs, is readily visible in each substrate’s swatch. “Natural” papers appear gray in the screen; those with OBAs appear to take on a purplish hue. The more purple the appearance of the swatch, the brighter-white the substrate and the higher the OBA content.

We’ll be continuing to add to and maintain this database, and enhance its capabilities to allow for even more powerful filtering and sorting. In the meantime, your feedback is appreciated.

– Jim and the team at Creekside Digital

The post New Database of Subtrates Used for Giclée Printmaking appeared first on Creekside Digital.

Rolling liquid laminate onto canvas

Greetings:

It’s another hot summer day here in Glen Arm: 97 degrees and rainforest-like. We have two larger microfilm digitization jobs which we’re currently seeing through, both of which should be ready to ship by next week.  I spent part of today hiding inside in the AC, revising and refitting a lot of the content on our website. Most noticeably, check out the new Frequently Asked Questions section in the navigation area. It’s got new FAQs for Book / Newspaper / Photo Scanning and Fine Art Scanning which are live right now, and others which will be up in the next few days. Essentially, we want to preload the answers to some of the most commonly asked questions about our services, and this is a great way to do it.

Finished 18x24 premium gallery wrap, ready to hang

On the giclée printing side of the house, as first seen on our Facebook page, we’re currently running a summer special for our artists and photographers: for a limited time, 18″x24″ premium gallery wraps on Breathing Color’s Lyve canvas, sealed with Breathing Color’s Timeless UV laminate, are just $99 plus shipping. This is a fabulous deal using some of the highest quality materials available today, for true museum-quality fine art printing. Here’s the way it works: you can send us your images via this link. We recommend selecting image files with a minimum resolution of 3,150 x 4,200 pixels to guarantee sharp, quality printing at this size, and we prefer to receive uncompressed TIFFs; but we’ll accept high-quality JPEGs and PSDs too. We’ll print your images out on Lyve canvas, and mirror the edges of the image in Photoshop so that when the canvas is wrapped and stretched onto the stretcher bars, the image continues around the sides of the wooden frame. Before we stretch the canvas, we’ll seal it with the Timeless product as shown above.  Timeless is a premium liquid laminate (gloss or matte finish) which adds a degree of UV and scuff resistance while increasing color saturation and keeping the thin coat of pigment ink from cracking off of the canvas when it’s stretched. Finally, we precisely stretch the sealed canvas onto a wooden frame. The result is a beautiful piece of artwork, ready to hang and enjoy for years to come.

Enjoy the rest of the summer!

– Jim and the team at Creekside Digital

The post A little bit of website maintenance, and gallery wraps galore! appeared first on Creekside Digital.

One other topic of discussion, especially with school right around the corner: text books. Does Creekside Digital scan text books? Absolutely. However, we are *not* in the business of facilitating copyright infringement, nor do we wish to engage textbook publishers in legal battles, so we require that all textbook orders are accompanied by a signed affadavit stating that either a) you own the rights to the books you’re having scanned, or b) you are having the book scanned for your own personal use and study, you agree not to distribute electronic versions of the digitized book to others, even for free, and furthermore, you agree to pay for our legal defense should we be sued. See Page 2 of our Microfilm Small Order Form for a general idea of what to expect. Having said that, yes, searchable digital versions of textbooks are superior to their heavy, physical counterparts in just about every way, so please contact us for information!

The post Just how many books are there? How about 129,864,880! appeared first on Creekside Digital.

Creekside Digital can scan all of the following major types of microform:

• 

  16 MM Film

  Rollfilm. As its name implies, rollfilm is a roll or spool of film containing a sequential series of frames. It comes it two widths: 16mm and 35mm. Typically, one finds rollfilm in lengths of 100′ or less.16mm rollfilm is the “typical” film width used for office-sized 8-1/2″ x 11″ / A4 documents. At 24x reduction ratio, it’s possible to fit about 2,500 documents on a 100′ roll of microfilm. One often finds check stubs, time cards, bills and invoices, and similar documents on this type of rollfilm. The frames can be quite small, especially with duplex microfilm (which captures both sides of each original document), so care and quality equipment are required to get sharp images which are true to the original. Sometimes spools of 16mm rollfilm will be enclosed in a square, open plastic frame to allow them to work with a specific microfilm reader / printer — but they will still have the same type of plastic spool and hub shown here.

  

  35mm Roll Film

  35mm rollfilm is used where larger frames are required due to bigger source documents. It is very popular for newspapers, architectural drawings, and engineering diagrams. Even lighting and quality optics with a wide depth-of-field are required to ensure there is no darkening or bluriness around the edges of the frames. 35mm rollfilm is also the film of choice for archiving older historic documents at a lower reduction ratio so the larger frames can be used to capture the original document at a much higher resolution.

  

  3M Cartridge

  3M cartridges are essentially 16mm rollfilm in a square, hard plastic case or “cartridge.” Rather than a single square hole in the middle of a plastic spool, 3M cartridges have a metal hub with four smaller, round holes. They often require a special adapter to allow them to be loaded onto a scanner, which not all vendors have (yes — Creekside Digital can work with 3M cartridges). Other than their cartridge format, 3M cartridges are identical to normal 16mm film in terms of what types of documents they’re typically used to store.

  

  Jacket Microfiche

• Microfiche. Microfiche comes in several different types:
  Jacket microfiche are strips of 16mm or 35mm film stored in a clear Mylar jacket or envelope. Jackets are typically 4″ x 6″ and can hold up to six strips of film, such that a matrix of images is created. A header strip across the top of the envelope will usually have the fiche’s title and indicate its contents.
  

  COM Fiche

  COM microfiche is typically used for technical manuals, parts lists, operation handbooks, etc. These are 4″ x 6″ sheets which have small individual frames arranged into a permanent grid pattern. Each sheet will have a header which has a title and describes its contents. COM fiche usually uses a higher reduction ratio (up to 50x or more) and a single sheet can hold up to 300 frames.

  

  Aperture Card

• Aperture Cards are punch cards (Hollerith cards) which have a single 35mm microfilm frame mounted in them. Aperture cards are typically used in engineering applications. The actual punch card portion of an aperture card may also contain index information about its image.

The bottom line: Creekside Digital can convert all of the above types of microform into digital images that you can view, email, and print from any PC. Still have questions about what type of film you have? Contact us!

The post What Kind of Microfilm do I Have? appeared first on Creekside Digital.

While OCR works very well with typewritten and printed text, the technology is currently very limited in its ability to recognize hardwritten (cursive) script, particularly on older documents of dubious quality. The one exception is with engineering drawings and architectural diagrams; we’ve found that quite often, the consistent “block” handwriting on such documents OCRs very well. Other commonly OCR’d documents include newspapers and parts catalogs on microfiche. Most commonly, Creekside will deliver PDF files with an invisible layer of text underneath the document image, which may be copied and pasted, searched, indexed, etc., just like any other office document. We can also provide other formats such as text files and spreadsheets for custom applications — just ask us. We scan all film to be OCR’d in grayscale at 300dpi if possible (as recommended by the publisher of the OCR software).

How about printed documents in other languages? Sure. Our server-based OCR engine recognizes a total of 184 languages, so newspapers and other printed documents in non-English languages are fair game.

How accurate is the OCR process? That depends on the quality of your source microfilm. If the document images are very clean and in a more modern font or typeface that’s very easy for the OCR engine to recognize, it’s not uncommon to see accuracy close to 100%. The accuracy may drop depending on several factors such as film sharpness, reduction ratio and resolution of the scans, (the smaller the frames, the less image information there is to recognize), how “clean” the documents are (folds, lines, and shadows across letters can confuse the OCR engine), etc. Having said that, Creekside Digital has successfully OCR’d microfilm of newspapers which are more than 150 years old, with excellent results.

So while 11th Century manuscripts and handwritten meeting minutes may not OCR very well, if you need to quickly find numbers, names, and other data within printed docs, optical character recognition is the way to go. It’s as easy as checking a box on our Small Order Form. (And if you need handwritten documents converted to electronic, searchable text, ask us about our data entry and manual indexing services).

The post To OCR or Not to OCR . . . ? appeared first on Creekside Digital.

Let’s start with a dirty little secret that the microfilm digitization industry DOESN’T want you to know: 50% of the actual work involved with scanning a roll of microfilm goes into (or at least, should go into) getting the optimal settings for that particular roll. This means that we adjust a number of variables including lamp brightness, gamma correction, focus / image sharpness, etc., EVERY TIME a new roll of microfilm is loaded into the scanner. Why? Because every roll is a little bit different. When your film was created thirty-five years ago, perhaps the camera operator was having a bad day, and after lunch he got a little sleepy and careless and overexposed a few rolls a little before (if) he found his mistake. If we cut corners and use the same settings for every roll or sheet in your project, odds are that some images will be overexposed, some will be too dark, and others will be skipped or poorly cropped due to misfiring frame detection (more on that later). We don’t do that, but a lot of other vendors out there do.

So prior to capture, we reset all of the critical settings for that particular roll of film. We double-check the focus, the reduction ratio, and the lamp brightness and gamma settings. We look at histograms to ensure that we’re maximizing the CCD camera’s available bandwidth. The dirty little secret is that, with modern production scanners, it doesn’t matter whether or not you have 20 frames or 2,000 frames — once we have everything set up, we hit “go” and the scanner processes your roll of film in its entirity, quickly and automatically. Due to the fact that a real person visually QAs everything after that initial capture process is complete (the other 50% of the work — or again, it should be), we’re able to capture many rolls quickly and correctly, GUARANTEE that you’re receiving everything that’s on your original source film, and charge you one competitive per-roll rate which covers all of the above processing. Once we give you a flat, per-roll quote, it’s easy to budget for your project, as you know exactly how much it we’ll cost (and we’ll put it in writing).

Most of the other vendors out there base their pricing on a per-image model. We can’t understand how anyone would be able to accurately budget their project unless they have an exceptionally good (and accurate) idea of how many images they had — which is rarely the case. What if your sample rolls from the vendor (you are getting complete sample rolls from the vendors you’re evaluating, aren’t you?) scan at an average of 2,400 images / roll but most of your rolls end up actually having 3,200 images / roll? To make matters worse, we hear of other fees associated with the per-image model such as “roll handling charges,” “per-DVD costs,” (if you don’t know how many images you have, how could you possibly know how many DVDs your project will consume?), and the dreaded “attended scanning rate,” which you must usually pay to guarantee that no images are skipped or improperly cropped. An extra charge to ensure quality? Come on. And what about duplex film? They’re not going to charge you for the front AND back of every document, are they? It’s insane, and there’s no reason for it if the vendor uses modern production microfilm scanning equipment and does things RIGHT.

All of Creekside’s rollfilm orders — from single rolls submitted using our Place Your Small Order Now >Small Order Form through large corporate and institutional projects consisting of thousands of rolls — are billed using flat-rate per-roll pricing. Period. No tricks or hidden fees. At Creekside Digital, our focus is on giving you the highest quality scans available today at reasonable prices, not nickle-and-diming you to death for everything we can think of. If your current microfilm scanning vendor doesn’t do this, you may want to ask them why.

The post Flat-Rate Pricing – Why it Matters appeared first on Creekside Digital.