2002.09.19 11:03 "TIFF Curious", by Mike Southern

2002.09.19 11:03 "TIFF Curious", by Mike Southern

Good mornng

I work with TIFF files from completely the opposite end from most people I read here. I just place them on a page, in magazines.

Actually, I place JPEGs, as the magazines are USA National car ad magazines, and so we have huge collections of classified and dealer adverts.

We have image capture and databasing techniques based around a cross-platform database engine, and one of the processes we perform on the images is to enhance the contrast of the image. We do this after the image comes off the digital camera card, and before it is placed in the database. We process in Photoshop, using custom actions, and a set of adjustments set using the Intellihance plugin.

The image adjustment is basically to decrease the gamma to compensate for over-inking on the press (because we are not printing on good paper, the dot gain is high). There are also similar adjustments if the pic is colour.

The cost of using Photoshop is high - not only financially (72 copies in my region) - but more importantly we pay a price for flexibility. The original system was designed using Photoshop 5. Photoshop 6 didn't understand some of the actions, sowe had to rewrite. There were other problems.

It would all be a lot easier to control if we could do away with Photoshop for this process, and have something more automated and still controllable that would perform the same task.

I would be interested in your collective thoughts and observations.

Thanks

Mike Southern