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

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Using the Pocahontas Times Digital Archives

Greetings!  It seems like we skipped spring and went straight to summer here in Glen Arm.  Baltimore tied the record at 98 degrees yesterday, and today will be almost that warm.

There’s a lot going on here.  We’re working on several larger microfilm scanning projects right now, with a lot of smaller microfilm and non-microfilm projects going in and out of the shop.  One of our customers, the Pocahontas County Historical Society, just published a great article about their completed project, which is a really good read.  The search mechanism to which they refer is an implementation of Adobe FullText Indexes, and it’s a great solution for inexpensive in-house keyword search capabilities without requiring any extra software (or even an Internet connection).

Also, we’re attending the annual BetterLight Owners Conference in San Carlos, CA this week . . . pretty much the center of the universe for all things related to digital scanning backs!  Of course, Creekside Digital has a BetterLight Super 8K system which we use for the imaging of cultural heritage projects as well as for our high-quality fine art reproduction services.

More soon!

The post Pocahontas Times Goes Live and BetterLight Owners Conference appeared first on Creekside Digital.

Essentially, this was a quality-driven decision for us. The halogen bulbs tend to cause hotspotting in the middle of the image, an effect which is particularly noticeable on larger positive frames (such as the ubiquitous 35mm newspaper diazo readers found in nearly every public library nationwide, which represent a lot of the film that we process). Well . . . that issue is gone thanks to the Lumintec lighting.

It’s a night-and-day upgrade — lots more light (critical at higher reduction ratios, where the camera is physically more distant from the film) which lets us run stopped-down when appropriate, more even illumination, no heat, 1/10th the power consumption of hot lights (yes . . . we’re green!), sharper images and less blurring due to the strobing, no chance of lamp failure (changing the bulb was previously a rather labor-intensive operation and represented real down-time) , and, well, it just looks cool when it’s on. Our microfilm customers will see an immediate improvement to the quality of their images.

Obligatory NextScan white paper at:

http://www.nextscan.com/products/documents/LuminTecWhitePaper.pdf

Pics soon!

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"Agitate-Agitate-Agitate" by Arvie Smith, imaged by Chris Becker for the Maryland Historical Society.

Creekside Digital is proud to introduce our Fine Art Capture and Giclée Printmaking services.  At our Glen Arm, Maryland location or onsite at your gallery, museum or studio, we provide the highest quality fine art digitization and reproduction services available today, for a very reasonable price.  From artists who desire to sell multiple copies of their oil paintings, watercolors, and other original artwork, to museums and galleries seeking to preserve and / or monetize their collections, Creekside Digital can help.

Creekside Digital uses the BetterLight digital scanning back system.  But out of all the technologies available today, why choose this platform?  For one, it allows us to make use of the finest large format optics available today — big, expensive German lenses from Schneider and Rodenstock that are optimized specifically for this kind of high-resolution, flat-field copy work.  Second, BetterLight’s color-matching capabilities are only equaled by the Cruse family of scanners — but those machines only allow for overhead (vertical) imaging, so they aren’t appropriate for sagging canvas, very thick or three-dimensional items, artwork which can’t lay down flat / horizontally, etc.  Because it’s compatible with any 4×5 view camera / lens, the BetterLight system gives us infinitely more flexibility and allows us to shoot not only 2D artwork, but sculpture, historic items / artifacts, products, tapestries, architecture, you name it.  Finally, its pixel count is unequaled, even by the most recent medium format digital backs from Phase One.  If extremely high resolution and color accuracy are required, the decision is pretty easy.

In addition to the capture itself — which is responsible for 90% of the effort that goes into making a great image — we use HP’s latest 12-color pigment ink printer technology.  This allows us to create museum-quality reproductions on photo paper, watercolor paper and cotton rag, matte lithograph paper, canvas, and a variety of other art media, and ship them anywhere in the world.

Of course, having the right equipment is only part of the solution.  You need an experienced, skilled large format photographer who knows how to use it, and make the most of its capabilities.  Chris Becker is Creekside’s on-staff photographer, and he’s spent his entire career performing this type of work.  Prior to joining Creekside, Chris worked for the Maryland Historical Society, where he imaged many priceless paintings, artifacts, and historic documents and manuscripts.  Chris is well-versed in how to handle, illuminate, and digitize fine artwork, and we’re thrilled to offer his talents to our customers via our new Fine Art Reproduction services!

The post New from Creekside Digital: Ultra-Quality Fine Art Capture and Giclée Printmaking appeared first on Creekside Digital.

Period document from 35mm NARA microfilm (18x) preserving original paper texture and creases (click for detail: 300dpi JPEG @ 60% quality, 1.51 MB)

Currently, we’ve got another project in the shop that is all National Archives microfilm — in this case, period documents from the 1860s. About half is 16mm, and the other half is 35mm. Typical of NARA rollfilm, the original documents on the 16mm rolls are the same size has those on the 35mm rolls, but the reduction ratio is higher — meaning the frames are smaller, and more documents can fit on a single roll. This also means that there’s less image information in each frame with which to work, which means it’s harder to get a nice, tight focus and set the scanner’s critical settings. You really have to take your time. Each roll of film is different, and there’s no “magic button” which automatically configures the best scanner settings whenever a new roll is loaded. That’s up to the operator, and that’s where experience with the equipment and having “an eye” for what great images look like makes all the difference.

One common issue with scanning period docs on NARA microfilm is the tremendous variation in image density on the same roll. Often, a roll will have a sequence of very dark documents, followed by extremely light papers. This is makes it very difficult to optimally set lamp and gamma: too low, and you end up with a bunch of dark and mostly illegible pages (virtually impossible to frame detect) followed by a document scanned at “normal” brightness. Too hot, and yes, the darker frames become legible — but the previously “normal” documents become overexposed and details like the paper grain start to burn out. It takes a lot of extra time to get everything set “just right” in order to output great images across an entire 100′ roll of film.

16mm NARA roll in the Auditor showing tremendous variation in film density

Creekside Digital’s scanning platform offers an unprecedented level of bandwidth to allow it to better capture the full range of image density found in a given roll of film. Grayscale images no longer look like a poor Xerox copy or over-dithered; shades of gray are as true to the original document as the source film allows. And although perfect automatic frame detection remains a pipe dream with film of highly-variable density, we have software tools which allow a person to visually audit and correct the frame boundaries proposed by the machine.

The screenshot shown here illustrates the high variation in film density we’re encountering on this project. Notice the automatic frame detection has done a good job at establishing initial frame boundaries (the yellow boxes). Any part of any yellow box can be grabbed by the operator with the mouse and dragged into the correct position. Frames can also be removed entirely, and dark frames which were cropped or skipped entirely by the machine can be added by a person prior to output. Try that with first-generation technology that outputs the images “on-the-fly” as the film passes through the scanner!

The post On NARA Publications & working with difficult film appeared first on Creekside Digital.

Recently, we’ve been working on a pair of 35mm archival conversions for libraries in Southern California. This means that the rollfilm is scanned at much higher resolution than normal — in this case, 400dpi — and that the output scans are 8-bit grayscale lossless TIFF images. It’s a more expensive, time-consuming process than “ordinary” 200 / 300dpi scanning with lossy compression, but the result is as close to a bit-for-bit copy of your source rollfilm as you can get given the current state of scanner technology.

Archival 400dpi lossless image at 100% zoom (click for detail)

A few things to keep in mind:

• 8-bit grayscale TIFFs at 400dpi are huge. A single 11″ x 17″ document might be 22 MB in size. Architectural drawings or a single 2-up newspaper frame might be up to 100MB or more. So delivery via external hard drive is pretty much a requirement for anything over a few rolls of film.
• Creekside Digital delivers its 8-bit grayscale TIFFs using LZW compression. This is a “lossless” compression scheme which uses rather complex mathematical algorithms to shrink down the file size while preserving bit-for-bit perfection of the original scan (i.e., an LZW-compressed file is visually identical to its uncompressed counterpart). The file size savings are marginal compared to “lossy” compression schemes, such as the popular JPEG format, but there’s no degradation of the image’s quality, either.


"Reader" 150dpi lossy image at 350% zoom (click for detail)

• Files this large are clumsy to work with, even on a fast, new computer. They consume vast amounts of disk space and can take awhile to copy or print. Generally, they’re too large to email. Because of this, we usually create downscaled “reader copies” in PDF format. These are lower-resolution files which library staff and patrons work with day-to-day; when they want to examine the original document with ALL of its high-resolution detail, they can pull the corresponding TIFF image. Additionally, it’s possible to deliver multipage reader copies on DVD (preferred by librarians) for ease of use on non-networked PCs, with each multipage file corresponding to an entire source roll of microfilm. And because the reader copies are so much smaller, you might fit fifteen rolls of film on a single DVD.
• PDF reader copies can be OCR’d, of course, allowing keyword search of typed / printed documents.

To see the difference between archival- and reader-quality images, click each of the two thumbnails above. The top image is a section of a 400dpi archival scan viewed at 100% zoom (no magnification) — you can see that the high resolution of the scan captures a tremendous amount of detail, and that there is no noise or other “artifacts” associated with compression (as lossless compression was used). The bottom image is the same frame, but as the image was a 150dpi reader, it was necessary to zoom to 350% magnification in order to view the same section of the original document at the same size — yes, archival scans are that large. Note the compression artifacts and loss of image detail on the reader copy. Again, readers are great for day-to-day use, but are no substitute for the detail captured with archival scans.

When you want the best-possible microfilm scan quality combined with the portability of the PDF format, contact Creekside Digital about archival scanning of your microfilm.

Happy Holidays!

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