At DLTS, we are always working on making our processes more efficient. On the digitization side, much of our work requires painstaking efforts that only skilled photographers can perform. Some of it, however, is tedious and repetitive, and a great candidate for automation.
At long last, one of these processes looks like it will be automated very soon: cropping. We are testing an auto-crop tool, which is comprised of a complex series of actions in Photoshop. This tool will work with both scanner and hi-res created materials. The images need to be photographed in an extremely specific way to be a candidate for auto-cropping, so it won’t work for every project, but it will still save us a lot of time.
A big thanks to Soumi Sarkar, one of our student photographers, who worked with a few pointers from the Web along with guidance from Chris Edwards at the Getty to create this tool.
Soumi created a really elegant solution! We’re looking forward to sharing the action w/ anyone interested.
Melitte