Coins and Medals – colour management at work in museums
May 21, 2008
Written by Rob Griffith.
I always enjoy working with Museums, it is fascinating to look behind the scenes and see things the public never do. The maze of corridors lined with collections and rows of bookshelves with obscure leather bound volumes go on for miles.
The British Museum has been a regular customer since we did project colour managing their Photographic department a few years ago. Last week I visited the Coins & Medals department, not an obvious candidate for colour management perhaps but since I have been doing colour management for nearly ten years now I have learnt that all kinds of people see a need for colour accuracy.
The Coins & Medals team were using an Epson Expression 10000XL flatbed scanner to scan some of their collection of 80,000 bank notes and coins and had bought from us a copy of X-Rite’s ProfileMaker Scanner Module, a couple of IT8 targets and an X-Rite EyeOne Display 2 for monitor calibration.
Once I had negotiated the vault-like entrance to the department I worked with the IS department to install the software and do some initial training and testing. We had to enable local admin rights on the PC to enable ProfileMaker to create and save the profiles into the correct Windows directory. Getting the IT/IS department on side is always needed in this type of project since they have to both understand the procedures and the reasons for varying from sometimes strict security policies, and also be the first line of support for the users.
The Epson scanner driver is very easy to profile because it has a No Colour Correction setting in the configuration dialogue that ensures that all current profiles and automatic adjustments are disabled, and this is very necessary when profiling scanners. The monitor was a standard Dell, not my first choice for colour accuracy, but the EyeOne Display did a good job of calibrating and profiling it. The initial tests went well and we were soon able to scan some bank notes and get a good representation on screen. As usual I checked out the Photoshop settings and asked the department some questions about how the images would be used to determine the best RGB colour space to be used. In this case since the images were going into the same database as the images from the Photographic department Adobe RGB was the best choice to ensure that all images in the database were in the same colour space. The Epson scanner driver also makes it easy to apply a scanner profile and convert to a working space as each scan is done.
After lunch we started the user training with four members of the department. Given that none of them were that familiar with scanning or working with images on a computer I kept the level of the training very simple. I showed them how to calibrate and profile the monitor and then got a couple of them to try, and then did the same with the scanner profiling. I made sure they kept notes and referred to them as they tried it out to make sure they made sense. After a couple of hours I was happy they had got to grips with it. I then made them all do a few scans to ensure that they were getting the results they needed.
During the testing I was able to help them with questions like what resolution they should be scanning to, whether they should sharpen images and to show them the Levels tool in Photoshop. Using the white point picker on the white background of the scanner to get a good dynamic range in the images, since bank notes often don’t have a natural white point of their own. Customers outside of the Graphics industry often pick my brains in this way since I am often the first contact with anybody experienced in professional image reproduction, even those in the Graphics industry benefit from a different viewpoint, both from my own end user experience of graphic design and repro and my years of going on site to customers and see different ways of approaching the same problems.
At the end of the day the users were all very happy they were getting great reproductions of the notes with very little effort, now if we could get a colour accurate printer in their with the right paper they could really start making some money…
Rob
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