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.

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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.

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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.

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Now available: World art and architecture from the Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives

More than 1,300 additional images of world art and architecture are now available from the Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives in the ARTstor Digital Library. This most recent addition of images includes art and architecture from Asia, the Pacific Islands, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. Since 2006, ARTstor has collaborated with the Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives and Art Resource to make available approximately 13,000 high-quality images of world art and architecture, which have been digitized from large-format color transparencies that photographer Erich Lessing produced over the course of a distinguished career spanning several decades of photographic campaigns around the world. This current release brings the total number of Lessing images available through ARTstor to more than 10,500.

Erich Lessing (b. 1923) is a member of the photographer’s collective, Magnum Photos. The Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives documents the fine arts, archaeology, religion, landscapes, historical sites, and historical personalities with images from more than 1,000 museums and 2,000 locations around the world, representing the works of approximately 3,000 artists and portraits of more than 1,900 historical figures. Art Resource is the official North American rights and permissions representative for the Lessing Archives.

To view Art, Archaeology, and Architecture (Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives): go to the ARTstor Digital Library, browse by collection, and click “Art, Archaeology, and Architecture (Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives);” or, if you are at your institution or have an ARTstor account, simply follow this link: http://library.artstor.org/library/collection/lessing

For more detailed information about this collection, visit the Art, Archaeology, and Architecture (Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives) collection page.

Related collections:

• Asian Art Photographic Distribution (AAPD) (University of Michigan)
• Huntington Archive of Asian Art
• Islamic Art and Architecture Collection (Sheila Blair, Jonathan Bloom, Walter Denny)
• Art History Survey Collection
• Italian and other European Art (Scala Archives)
• Réunion des Musées Nationaux

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Additional images from the Art, Archaeology, and Architecture (Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives)

In 2006, ARTstor, Art Resource, and the Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives announced a collaboration to make available through ARTstor 14,000 high-quality images of world art and architecture. This current release of 2,125 images focuses on Ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art, as well as Early Christian and Byzantine art.

Images of works in the Lessing Archives will continue to be added to the ARTstor Digital Library in regular releases until the collection is complete. This current release brings the total number of Lessing Archives images available through ARTstor to more than 9,000. These images, on average 120 megabytes in size, have been scanned from large-format (4″x5″ or 8″x10″) color transparencies made by Erich Lessing in the course of a distinguished career spanning several decades of photographic campaigns around the world.

To view Art, Archaeology, and Architecture (Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archive): go to the ARTstor Digital Library, browse by collection, and click “Art, Archaeology, and Architecture (Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives).” Or search the keywords: erich lessing .

For more detailed information about this collection, see the Art, Archaeology, and Architecture (Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives) page.

Related Collections:

• Art History Survey Collection
• Italian and other European Art (Scala Archives)

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More European art and architecture from Scala Archives

Through an ongoing collaboration with Art Resource and Scala Archives (Florence, Italy), ARTstor has just released 2,848 additional images of major Italian and other European works, bringing the total number of Scala images now available in ARTstor to more than 13,000. ARTstor will ultimately make available approximately 12,000 high-quality images of European art and architecture from Scala, with a special focus on the archaeology, art, and architecture of Italy and on the collections of the major museums in Italy and other European countries.
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Please note that we are hard at work clustering these superior images with other ARTstor images that depict the same works of art. ARTstor clustering helps users find the optimal image of a given work of art. For an example of ARTstor clustering, please search for “Raphael Disputa Scala.”
To browse and view the images in this collection: from the “Welcome Page,” click on “ARTstor Collections,” and then choose “Italian and European Art (Scala Archives).”
For more detailed information about this collection, see the Italian and European Art (Scala Archives)

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Additional images from Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives

In 2006, ARTstor, Art Resource, and the Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives announced a collaboration to make available through ARTstor 10,000 high-quality images of world art and architecture. This collaboration focuses on key artists of the major European schools and collections of the major European museums outside Italy, including the leading art museums of Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Spain. These images, on average 120 megabytes in size, have been scanned from large-format (4”×5″ or 8”×10″) color transparencies made by Erich Lessing in the course of a distinguished career spanning several decades of photographic campaigns around the world.

Images of works in the Lessing Archives have been added to the ARTstor Digital Library in regular releases over recent months. We will continue to add to the collection until it is completed. This current release of approximately 3,500 images brings the total number of images available through ARTstor to more than 7,000, and the collection now includes works by the following European artists:

• Sofonisba Anguissola
• Annibale Carracci
• Théodore Chassériau
• Hans Baldung
• Benvenuto Cellini
• Canaletto
• David Friedrich Caspar
• Gustave Caillebotte
• Marc Chagall
• Honoré Daumier
• Maurice Denis
• Gerrit Dou
• Théodore Géricault
• Jean–Baptiste Greuze
• Matthias Grünewald
• Francesco Guardi
• Jean–Antoine Houdon
• Claude Lorrain
• Lorenzo Lotto
• Paul Klee
• Oskar Kokoschka
• Kazimir Malevich
• Berthe Morisot
• Alphonse Mucha
• Anton Raphael Mengs
• Jean–François Millet
• Amedeo Modigliani
• Bartolomé Estebán Murillo
• Parmigianino
• Auguste Rodin
• Bartholomaeus Spranger
• Elisabeth Louise Vigée–LeBrun
• Edouard Vuillard
• Francisco de Zurbarán
• Georges Seurat
• Giovanni Paolo Panini
• Guido Reni
• Jusepe de Ribera
• Tilman Riemenschneider
• Jacob van Ruisdael
• Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
• Leonardo da Vinci

To browse and view the images in this collection: from the “Welcome Page,” click on “ARTstor Collections,” and then choose “Art, Archaeology, and Architecture (Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives).”

For more detailed information about this collection, see the Art, Archaeology, and Architecture (Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives) page.

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