Speed The Plow N G A

Imaging and Visual Services (DIVS)

Alan Newman
Chief, Imaging and Visual Services
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
MCN2009 - November 13

In late 2004 the Gallery began direct imaging of collection objects in
studios with high-resolution, color accurate digital cameras. We adhere
to ICC and ISO industry standard color-managed workflow for image
capture, display, evaluation and output. This is a rigorous, labor-
intensive color matching process---as Stanley said, think SLOW. Rapid
Capture or RapCap or Speed the Plow is a methodology to get 90%
quality for 10% of the effort with 1,000% the production.

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Imaging and Visual Services (DIVS) Rapid Capture

 Rapid Capture Goals
 Staff Training
 Initial Software Setup
 Software Settings
 Color Profile
 Artwork Preparation
 Photography
 Image Cataloging

Assembly-line imaging is modeled after museum projects at Harvard
(kudos to Sam Quigley for pushing the idea), Chicago and the British
Museum. Of course assembly line imaging grew out of the Google Book
and other archives and library digitization projects in the early nineties.
Even before, the AIC build a copystand with two cameras on a wheel to
shoow 35mm b&w & color slides on each for all the originaldrawings.
For its time it was a trailblazer, but quality was surpassed by today’s
high-end DSLRs. We shot 1,000 Max Beckmann sketches in 2007 as a
proof of concept. Our choice of camera is the Canon5D MarII which
gives the best cost/quality return.

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 Massive infusion of collection images on Gallery
website
 Increase web images from present 8,000 to
23,000 in 2011
and 55,000 by 2013
 From 6% (2009) to 49% (2013) of collection
 Provide free images of works in the public domain
for non-commercial, educational uses.

The critical goal is to show what has not been seen and distribute what
is seen in an effortless way. We just began a two year project funded at
the Gallery by the Samuel Kress Foundation. We pledged to provide
any image we shoot in the public domain free to scholars and the
general public, for any non commercial use.

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A large yield of images is only possible with a different
quality assurance model.
90% quality for 10% effort and 1,000% the production.
Color is profiled for each discrete lighting setup.
Images are very good quality for the web and permit
pan/zoom to show detail. Currently using Canon5DII 22mp
Images can be used for print reproductions in the future
and can be finely color matched to the original on an ad
hoc basis for high-end publication.
We should not need to reshoot.

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“…we believe [this grant] will put the Gallery at the forefront of
major art museums seeking to enlist emerging technologies in
support of both the preservation and the provision of access to
their collections. The Kress Foundation's Board of Trustees is
especially pleased to know that the Gallery will make the
thousands of digitized images produced through this important
project available online, at high resolution and free-of-charge,
for scholarly and educational use, including reproduction in
scholarly publications; … that the Gallery is firmly committed to
this goal. We applaud the Gallery for seeking to establish a
model that holds the promise of addressing perhaps the single
greatest challenge faced by art historical publishing today,
which other art museums will feel compelled to adopt….”

So we are addressing a potential crisis in art publishing, i.e. the
continued rise in fees for a commodity that once made has a
meaningless cost to the museum to maintain and distribute.
We’ll have further discussion about these issues tomorrow with
Amalyah, Simon Tanner and John in a session unfortunately titled
perverse-reverse economics.

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Art Handling
Workflow Orientation

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Initial one-time setup of preferences in the various software packages
to establish:
• watch folders for automatic ingestion and image processing in
Lightroom
• automatic file naming
• export specifications

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Adobe DNG Profile Editor is used for creating a camera profile in
Lightroom. Using the “chart” method provides a colorimetric calibration
that performs reasonably well for most artwork.

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Shot # ObjectID ObjectNo Attribution Title Class Location Existing Digital
Box1/D,BR,XX,
1 4678 1943.3.1534 Sir Muirhead Bone Vega of Granada Drawing no
BONE,2/7
Roman Bridge, Box1/D,BR,XX,
2 4684 1943.3.1540 Sir Muirhead Bone Drawing no
Zamora BONE,2/7
River at Gerona, Box1/D,BR,XX,
Spain BONE,2/7
Box1/D,BR,XX,
4 4688 1943.3.1544 Sir Muirhead Bone Evening in Ronda Drawing no
BONE,2/7
Box1/D,BR,XX,
5 4691 1943.3.1547 Sir Muirhead Bone Gerona Road Drawing no
BONE,2/7

Praying Bench, San Box1/D,BR,XX,
Pedro, Gerona BONE,2/7

Box1/D,BR,XX,
7 4692 1943.3.1548 Sir Muirhead Bone Dawn, Cuenca Drawing no
Before Photography:The Museum TechAsturian create aBox1/D,BR,XX, the artworks
Old
will list of
BONE,2/7

to be photographed for a given day. Houses, Oviedo BONE,2/7

This list will originate in TMS as an object package.
The final list for photography must be in spreadsheet form
with object numbers or TMS IDS included as a distinct
column and a column of sequence numbers beginning at
1. The spreadsheet of artworks to be photographed will
be sent to the photographer and to DIVS image
catalogers. We use copy-paste instead of typing to link
filenam to accession#.

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Exposure is determined using a BabelColor White target in order to
maximize the exposure without clipping the highlights. Each artwork is
photographed with the grayscale patches of the Macbeth ColorChecker
and a ruler. If it is an abstract work of art, then an arrow is included to
indicate orientation.
The lens is set to f/8.0, since this was determined in previous testing to
provide the optimal MTF for that camera/lens combination.

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James McBey, A Tinker Child, Macduff, 1914

To help keep the “rapid” in rapid capture, whenever possible the
artwork is photographed with the matte closed and this is then used as
a cropping guide.
All post-processing is done in Adobe Lightroom. The only work that
needs to be done manually is to crop the image and rotate if necessary.
Because cropping is done in Lightroom, it is non-destructive and can be
changed at any time as needed.

The last step for the photographer is to export the images to DNG
format.

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DNG files are imported into Extensis Portfolio, the image database
currently used at NGA. Metadata is imported from TMS and the Image
Catalogers review and assign additional metadata.

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This is another view into the same image database showing a technical
approval by a second photographer (general exposure & color) and the
museum technician who approves the orientation and the correct match
of unique object id (accession#) to the image. So all approvals and
workflows take place online.

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