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Reader Comment, Christopher Campbell: Optimizing the Digitization of Paintings and Drawings

Artist and photographer Christopher Campbell writes about his incredibly labor-intensive efforts to create ideal color matching when photographing art.

See his videos page as well as the video discussed here, Optimizing the Digitization of Paintings and Drawings.

Optimizing the Digitization of Paintings and Drawings

I have been photographing paintings with great care for thirty years, using first a Hasselblad, then a Sinar 4x5, a series of digital Canon cameras, switching to three successive full-frame Sonys, before ending up with a Phase One IQ3 100MP Trichromatic on an Arca-Swiss M-line body in 2019. With the arrival of the COVID pandemic in early 2020, safely isolated with my family in Pennsylvania, I realized that it was a perfect time to re-examine some of my assumptions in the way I photographed paintings and drawings. I began to do some experiments, checking in with friends and colleagues, and began one major project: to build a camera profiling target entirely appropriate to the photography of oil paintings because it was actually constructed out of oil paint — some 270 patches. Every couple of days I would set up the glass slab, the mylar sheets and drawdown bar, and create a few more color patches. Measuring the patches with a MYIRO-1 and graphing the colors in ColorThink Pro, I gradually built a limit-case target with the greatest possible hue saturation in an unconstrained brightness range.

Christopher Campbell’s target patch setup (oil paints)

The extended isolation somehow suggested patient research, and I found myself bouncing back and forth between making paintings and studying the nuances of their digitized versions. The more carefully I compared them, the less happy I was with the reproductions, and I discovered that I had taken far too many things for granted. I began filling a little journal with detailed notes, lowering the angle of my four flashes to minimize corner reflections, comparing the flat fielding functions of Capture One and Adobe Lightroom. I assembled a finished target from my oil paint drawdowns, and discovered sensor metamerism between the oil paint patches and the printed Canon inkjet grayscale I had embedded at the center of the target. I built sets of my own object-level targets so that I could quantify vignetting and flat fielding efficacy, built dozens of camera profiles for the Phase One using basICColor input pro 6, considered the implications of ICC vs DCP profiles, and learned from Franz Herbert how to properly validate a profile. I used a black trap to see how much flare I was getting on my copy stand, and modified a Versalab Parallel to make it possible to dial in the parallelism of my camera to a painting to mere minutes of arc. Robin Myers coached me on how to measure the SNI (“Spectral Neutrality Index”) of white balance patches, and Iliah Borg turned me on to the astonishingly neutral whiteness of PTFE. I dove into extended testing of the effects of polarizing only the flashes, or using full cross-polarization, and Iliah helped me analyze the results, producing some remarkable graphs that show the extent to which the Sony sensor in the IQ3 goes non-linear when paintings are photographed under cross-polarized light.

Christopher Campbell’s artist studio

By the late spring of 2021, after nearly eighteen months of intermittent experimentation, friends suggested that I apply to give a presentation at the Rijksmuseum 2+3D Photography conference, and to my surprise it was accepted. The presentation seemed to go well, but I wasn’t happy with the recording, limited as it was by the fact that it had to be delivered remotely over Zoom. I had wanted to learn to edit video in Final Cut Pro, and with the help of some excellent tutorials from Larry Jordan and Ripple Training, it became possible to export my Apple Keynote presentation to .png slides, drop them into a timeline, and create a proper 4K video out of the lecture. In the process, I slightly revised and expanded a few topics (it now runs 23 minutes), and since it is now a proper video after all, added some actual video footage.

https://vimeo.com/studiocampbell

Strangely, I haven’t done any serious copy work in months, having been almost entirely focused on making paintings since last summer. I know enough now, however, to take fewer things for granted, and to realize the value of following one’s intuition and curiosity: what if I did this, instead of that? ImageMuse is a wonderful community, and there were many times that I searched back through the archives to see how other more experienced photographers handled things I was investigating. To those that watch, I hope it’s obvious that nothing I suggest is definitive. The video is simply a record of the state of my current understanding, and I look forward to any comments viewers might have.

Christopher Campbell’s copy stand setup

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