Digital imaging standards

The Electronic Lupe 2005

The magnifier or lupe, key piece of kit for the picture industry, is on its way out. The pixel now reigns. Raise a magnifier to the picture industry and its working practices, and you detect signs of some very profound changes. The pattern of skills, the language of communication and the information flow are all undergoing a metamorphosis. Here are some of the indicators.

Several years ago when Electric Lane started digital training we fondly imagined that those basic skills would soon be general knowledge.  We would need to move on to more advanced skills and new technologies. What we are finding, year on year, is that many companies are still at the starting blocks.  We spend a lot of time teaching ‘digital literacy’, or the understanding of the language of the digital file.

Successful delivery of hard copy transparencies and prints use to rely on experts at each end of the process.  The photographer had to produce a technically and aesthetically good image; pre-press created separations to produce the best print output.  All relevant information was included in the hard copy - colour, size resolution and even caption information. It could all be inspected by eye.  Many publishers still prefer to work this way.

But the digital workflow requires the picture users– the picture libraries, publishers and designers – to acquire image handling skills themselves. The focus of training and expertise has shifted to include the large numbers of people in the middle section of the publishing workflow. We can no longer rely on the previous picture experts to get things right.

In reality the industry is at toddler stage in digital workflow terms. An image can pass from photographer to picture library , researcher  and designer without encountering anyone who is able to give it the once over. It is like watching a row of people passing a transparency  from hand to hand with their eyes shut.

The further down the chain you go, the more expensive it becomes to rectify mistakes, often picked up at pre-press. This can get very expensive for publishers, and is why they are beginning to realise the value of picture handling skills for their staff.

Preflighting becomes more significant as the industry wakes up to the cost production mistakes . But the focus so far has been digital file quality at pre-press. What’s missing is image checking procedure at the start of the production cycle at the publishing end.

This is sorely needed as many photographers lack the skills to produce print-worthy images. Substandard images need to be weeded out at an early stage. Pre-flighting needs to be pushed back upstream as far as images are concerned.

But can’t all this checking be done automatically? Well, yes, it can for some of the items of the image check list.  You can set up a routine to check for filesize, resolution, image format, colour space and colour profiles and metadata field use.  But software can’t currently check for compression artefacts, oversharpening, colour balance or colour saturation. There may  be some very clever developments in the future, but there will always be some elements that need checking by eye.

And are things really that bad? We think so. In the course of our consultancy we see a good cross section of the scans which are currently circulating. Many of them are not up to scratch, and won’t last into a future where publishing staff are more digitally savvy. Scanning is an expensive business, and we try to point out to people that getting it right now is what makes the investment in staff and kit worth doing. One digital consultant recently estimated that 50% of today’s digital scans would not meet the standards of the future. That’s a lot of money down the drain. 

The other big culture change is the move to an RGB workflow. The CMYK colour space, being print and sometimes press specific, is not relevant for a full production cycle which includes output to web, projection, inkjet printing or to one of the newer print processes like Hexachrome. To be future proof, an image must be archived in a wider colour space than CMYK. The archival image is becoming the equivalent of the photographic ‘original’.

Publishers who are currently archiving CMYK scans will soon see the advantages of retaining an RGB original which can be repurposed in a number of ways. The RGB to CMYK conversion is one from a larger to a smaller colour gamut, or range of colours. It makes sense to retain images in RGB until late in the process, when size of image use and precise settings for the press can be used.

Digital skills have traditionally resided with pre-press houses which scan  separated CMYK image files to fit a particular press. The RGB workflow on the other hand is based on the ‘one scan for all uses’ philosophy, and requires different skills to create a good image. Traditional photographer skills of image assessment need to be blended with the more technical approach of pre-press.

The picture industry is still struggling with fact that the disciplines are still separate. Photographers as a group are under-skilled in the digital technical area, while pre-press staff need retraining to apply their approach to the RGB colour space. A lot of anomalies still exist. Scanner software for example is often still set up with CMYK scans in mind even though the scanners are sold for bulk use in the picture library industry. This causes all sorts of problems for people who rely on the advice of scanner manufacturers. 

Another big potential advance in publishing is the possibility of adding metadata to the image file. Along with the technical data automatically added by Photoshop, are fields the user can populate themselves.  These fields hold possibilities the industry is only beginning to understand. 

A number of standardised fields can be accessed in File/info in Photoshop and these broadly describe the origin, content and copyright status of the image, along with caption information. This information is potentially very useful to publishers, who should be able to automatically pick up caption and credit information and thus avoid the process of re-keying.  It is also useful to picture libraries, as the data within the image file stays with the picture. 

Will this put an end to mis-captioning and the lack of photo credits on the part of publishers? The potential is there, but only if the industry uses metadata fields in a consistent way.  The picture library industry association BAPLA is looking into the issue. The first review indicates that image libraries are only now beginning to use the metadata fields and are not consistently using the same ones. And publishers are often not picking up on the metadata at all. Many libraries, particularly in the news sector, quite reasonably put all caption and credit information in the caption field as that is the only area picked up by their clients’ software. 

So we have some work to do in sorting out the current situation, which could be eased if a minimum number of  key fields were consistently populated. That would be a start. BAPLA will be doing some research amongst clients to investigate current and future practice in the publishing industry . The IDEA Alliance in the US  has also worked on defining a number fields within the existing IPTC and Dublin core structures. Pic4Press will take up the issue as well. 

The longer term presents us with more opportunities for improving information flow between image providers and image users.  Ad production departments are already beginning to include JDF enabled software in their toolkit. The advantage of job information staying with the file has been recognised as a big productivity boost.  This should be a signal to the publishing industry to buck up its act on the picture front.

Now that Adobe’s XMP format allows use of XML fields in Photoshop, the opportunities for including job information are endless and flexible.The major task now is to attempt some standardisation of metadata field usage in the current situation.

Digital workflows make life more interesting. No part of the industry can sit alone in its own box. We all have to work together to extract the maximum benefits from this new way of working. 

(c) Sarah Saunders, Electric Lane
Published in Print Media Management October 2005.