Behind the scenes at ARTstor: Technology

John Marin | Hurricane | 1944 | Image © Indianapolis Museum of Art; imamuseum.org | © 2008 Estate of John Marin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

How the ARTstor Digital Library Weathered the Storm
By Mary Finer, Project Coordinator

ARTstor is in the goal-setting time of the year, and expanding our disaster recovery efforts is high on the Technology department’s list—especially after last year. We’re in pretty good shape though. While sites such as Buzzfeed and The Huffington Post were down during “Superstorm” Sandy, the ARTstor Digital Library remained accessible.

ARTstor has servers in Manhattan and Denver, and each location has backups of each other in case disaster strikes. In New York our servers are at 60 Hudson Street, a.k.a. “the Hub,” a 1.8 million square foot facility where the Internet’s transatlantic cable lands. It used to be the center of Western Union’s telegraph network when it was built in the late 1920s, and is now the Grand Central Station of the Internet.

Read Full Post »

Behind the scenes at ARTstor: Metadata

By Dustin Wees, Director of Metadata and Cataloging

At cocktail parties and in the checkout line at Whole Foods, I’m often asked to explain the difference between data and metadata. I first try “You know the difference between physics and metaphysics, don’t you? Metadata is a lot more philosophical than data.” When that flops—and it usually does—I then try a more prosaic answer: “Metadata is data about data.” In terms of the ARTstor Digital Library, I think of the image as data, and the metadata is the information about the image.

ARTstor’s metadata is an additive aggregation of heterogeneous bits—the equivalent of yellow stickies and typed lists. But we refer to differing schemas and databases, and it comes from various places and in a variety of forms. Typically, our contributors have already created the metadata for their own uses, frequently tailoring the requirements to their point of view. Describing old master paintings, say, uses categories of information that differ from those describing arrowheads or autograph letters.

Read Full Post »

Behind the scenes at ARTstor: Light value and color adjustments, part 3

Lily Galib, Production Associate, Image Quality Control, has written a three-part post on the ins-and-outs of light value adjustments. Part 1 covered histograms, part 2 working with Photoshop’s Levels Adjustment Tool and the Curves Adjustment Tool, and part 3 concludes with color.

Color:

Levels and Curves adjustment layers showing the color channel selector. This is where you can select individual color channels to work with if you’re making color adjustments, or RGB if you’re adjusting light values.

When making color adjustments with the Levels Adjustment Tool and the Curves Adjustment Tool, the basic functions are the same (3 set adjustment points for Levels; anchor points for Curves) but you break the histogram down into the individual color channels. There are a few different color working spaces, but the ones you will most commonly encounter are RGB and CMYK. Generally speaking, RGB is used for images that will be viewed on a screen and CMYK is used for print. Digital cameras capture images in RGB, which stands for red, green, and blue. CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, which are the ink colors used in printing. I’m only going to deal with RGB here since it is the color space you’re most likely to use. At ARTstor we always work in RGB.

Read Full Post »

Behind the scenes at ARTstor: Light value and color adjustments, part 2

Lily Galib, Production Associate, Image Quality Control, has written a three-part post on the ins-and-outs of light value adjustments. Part 1 covered histograms, part 2 covers working with Photoshop’s Levels Adjustment Tool and the Curves Adjustment Tool, and part 3 concludes with color.

Adjusting with the Levels Adjustment Tool:

Levels adjustment layer, showing the histogram with the three adjustment points

Levels is a fairly basic tool for making light value adjustments. When adjusting with Levels, you have three set adjustment points laid out on top of a histogram: black, white, and a midpoint adjuster. You make changes to the histogram by sliding these three adjusters along a horizontal line at the bottom of the histogram. Moving the black and white adjusters sets the black and white points and moving the midpoint adjuster redefines the midpoint. Sliding the midpoint adjuster to the left stretches the values between the midpoint and the black point (0) and compresses the values between the midpoint and the white point (255). This lightens the midtones and increases the contrast in the darker half of the histogram, while decreasing it in the lighter half. As a result you will see more detail in the darker midtones and less in the lighter midtones. Sliding the midpoint adjuster to the right does the opposite.  Once you set these points, Photoshop will interpolate the light values accordingly and even out the histogram. The black and white points that you set become the ends with the midpoint once again centered between the two.

Read Full Post »

Behind the scenes at ARTstor: Light value and color adjustments, part 1

Every month the ARTstor Blog announces new available collections from an international community of museums, artists, artists’ estates, photographers, scholars, special collections, and photo archives. Many teams in ARTstor work behind the scenes to make this possible: User Services, Library Relations, Production, Communications, Metadata & Cataloging, Collection Development, Finance, Human Resources/Administration, Legal, Software Development, Database Administration/Systems, User Experience, Quality Assurance, and Implementation. This month we begin a new series in which staff members explain the many steps required to share these images with you.

Lily Galib, Production Associate, Image Quality Control, has written a three-part post on the ins-and-outs of light value and color adjustments. Read part 2 and part 3.

The Production Department’s Imaging team (L to R): Lee Caron, Senior Production Associate; Lily Galib, Production Associate; Todd Forde, Production Associate; Quaid Kocur, Imaging Production Supervisor.

At ARTstor, we have a philosophy of maintaining the integrity of the original artworks we feature in the Digital Library and representing them as accurately as possible. Consequently, our focus in the Production department is on image correction rather than image manipulation. This means that preserving detail is a priority when making light value and color corrections, and we never do retouching on top of artwork.  For example, if a slide of a painting has been stored in poor conditions and is dirty and color shifted, we will correct for the color shift in order to match the actual painting as closely as possible, but we won’t push our adjustments into the realm where Photoshop is creating false color or detail. We won’t remove dirt from the top of a painting because that would alter the artwork and create an inaccurate representation.

Read Full Post »