Digitisation

Conservators are not generally involved with digitisation, but after 9 years of experience in digitisating archival materials, my path to conservation has been a little bit back-to-front and I am now in a very fortunate situation to have the skills to both conserve an original archival object and to digitise it.

The digitisation of materials is at the forefront for many collections, and plays a big part in not only extending the lives of materials by reducing handling but also by opening collections to wider audiences when a visit is not feasable – this is of course making a general assumption that access to the internet is available.

The Design Archives have a long and successfull history in digitisation. Posters and larger materials that do not fit into our scanners are photographed instead. For photographing large pieces, myself and my colleague Barbara Taylor use the photographic studio here at Grand Parade. For acquiring the best possible results, we use a Mamiya RZ medium format camera with a digital Imacon back attached and a set of flashes for even lighting.

The issue with digital photography and scanning of materials is that despite the advances in digital equipment over the years, details can still get ‘lost in translation’. With the Max Gill ‘sample poster’, the issue became the finely detailed black ink images lined along the bottom of the piece. The digital elements of the camera were not able to handle the thin black lines so close together and created a colour effect on the image that is not present in the original.

The only way to get around this phenomenon was in the post-photography production of the image. By isolating the affected areas and adjusting colour casts and contrast in Photoshop, I could lessen the effect of the colour and bring the digitised version of the poster closer to what the original looks like.

Since the ‘sample poster’ was digitised with the goal of possibly creating a facsimile for the forthcoming exhibition, the file size, pixel count and focus needed extra attention. The plan is for the reproduction to be printed out the same size as the original. For optimising the results, this means that the pixel count needed to be high and the dimensions of the digital file the same as the original dimensions of the poster. Colour matching will also prove a challenge, as the way in which colours are represented are as numerous as there are computer screen calibrations in the world. For any final printing, the printers would ideally need access to the original to be able to match the facsimile colours as closely as possible with the original colours on the poster.