Beaford Archive
Some of you may already be aware of the wonderful project in which we are involved with Beaford Arts in making selected examples of the famed James Ravilious archive available for the public to buy.
It proved a real labour of love for us, who all knew James well, to help bring his study of life in Devon to a wider audience. Scanning his original negatives and trying not to drool over the contact sheets that told us the stories surrounding his well loved and iconic images.
The scanning portion of our part in the project (1,700 images) took us nine months to complete, with three of us rotating the task. We benefited greatly, of course, in having access to Alan Winn who spent some time printing for James and gave us unique insight into how to prepare the files just as the great man himself would want them.
Beaford Workflow - First Stage
 |
|
Scan image at 4000dpi in RGB on Nikon LS9000 film scanner
Add Meta Data from supplied spreadsheet and save as .tif in scanned folder
Spot
Crop and resize to 18"x12" @300 dpi
Desaturate image
Prepare for print – Adjust levels, contrast, curves, digital burn and dodge
Save in prepared folder
Create 'thumbnail' image and add it the to spreadsheet.
Batch conversions for print
Separate landscape from portrait images
Batch Resize images to 12"x 8"
Batch resize canvas to 15"x10"
Apply Beaford copyright text
Save in print folder
Batch conversions for Screen / Web
Batch resize images to 768 pixels for screen
Save in web/screen folder
|
Beaford Workflow - Second Stage
The second stage of digitisation was carried out 'in house' by Beaford.
We work from the raw files which they provide, adjust and prepare them for print.
These are opened in Rawtherapee using a custom profile created especially for this project and working in 32 bit depth. They are then exported to the Gnu Image Manipulation Program as Argb files.
Adjustments carried out in the Gnu Image Manipulation Program
Spot
Resize to 19" x 12.66" @300 dpi
Prepare for print - Adjust levels, contrast, curves, digital burn and dodge
Save in prepared folder as 16bit .tif files.
Resize images to 12" x 8"
Resize canvas to 15" x 10" and apply Beaford copyright text
Save in print folder
|
|
See a quick video of the process, without the lengthy spotting procedure
There is no sound on the video, use the full screen option on the video to enlarge
|
|
