Analysis #9--Is Digital Good for Artists?

Is the shift to digital image capture and processing good for artists or bad for them?  It is good for stock agencies, such as mine (Index Stock), or bad for them?  Is it good for customers who use stock images, or bad for them?

The shift away from film creation of images and towards digital creation is well established.  In 2000, virtually all of our new images came to us on film.  By this year, more than 95% are coming to us digitally.

Most of the film images we now get are either “art” images, taken using special processing or under very controlled lighting or circumstances, or older images that are felt to still have value.  I suspect that more than 90% of our artists now own a digital camera and use it for some or all of their professional shoots.

We have stated a policy that we will continue to accept submissions of images on film for the foreseeable future.  This policy differs from those of several other leading stock agencies, including Corbis.  Why?  Because we felt that the most important thing we should consider, when reviewing images, was their artistic quality.  We did not want to block our artists from maximizing their creativity with an artificial rule.  Still, we must accept that almost all of the images we receive one or two years from now will be digital.

Is that a good thing for artists?  I can think of three reasons it is bad, and seven reasons it is good:

Bad Things About Digital for Artists

1.  Have to buy a new camera. This is a major investment, but artists have to regularly replace and upgrade their equipment, anyway.  Most of the new digital cameras work with existing lenses, filters, and lights.  The artist may end up spending less on scanning equipment and storage space for slides, although this benefit may be partly offset by more digital storage costs.

2.  Have to learn how to use the new camera. Digital cameras have slightly different light-handling characteristics from film cameras.  Our artists will need to learn new tricks for reducing glare and ways to keep their images from appearing flat.

3.  Need to learn new post-processing skills. Most artists gave up developing or printing their own images, long ago.  They switched to positive transparency film and let a professional lab do all the physical image management work.  However, during the late 90s and early 00s, many artists started scanning their film images and reprocessing them electronically.  They learned to use Photoshop and other tools, to make their film images look better.  Our artists will now need to adjust these techniques to make them work with digital originals.  They need to understand the issues associated with converting RAW files (the files that digital cameras generate) into more-standard formats like JPEG and TIFF.  They have to learn more about color spaces and how to manage them well.  Some artists object to this part of the process and reject becoming so “computer-oriented.”  I believe we will see “electronic development” businesses spring up, to perform the role that professional labs did with film.

Good Things About Digital for Artists

1.  Immediate feedback. Like Polaroid film, digital cameras give the artist immediate feedback.  If a shot doesn’t work, the artist can see the problem and fix it, before the light has changed or the model gets bored!

2.  One less generation between the artist and the user. Scanning positive transparency film automatically causes the loss of some details and color quality.  Some feel that digital completely avoids this loss.  However, the RAW to standard format conversion I mention above does create losses of quality, similar to the generation losses in scanning.  Still, it should be easier to minimize these losses than it has been to compensate for scanning losses.  Digital images should look more like their original concept, when they are used.

3.  Easier to post-process. Digital images can be printed immediately.  They can be compressed or expanded to almost any size, without a “rescan.”  There should be no scratches on a digital original, and little dust.  All of these changes should reduce the post-processing time on each image.

4.  Immediate capture of some information.  Most digital cameras automatically write EXIF information into their digital files.  The EXIF standard includes room for the date and time an image was taken, what camera settings were used, and in theory via a GPS hookup, exactly where the image was taken.  All of this information is valuable for establishing an image’s “provenance.”  It should also be helpful in court, as proof of ownership, and to help an artist learn more about what camera settings do and do not work, well.

5.  Better long-term preservation of the image. A digital image will not lose its color or sharpness, over time.  Of course, computer media does deteriorate, over time.  Therefore, artists need to properly backup multiple copies of their digital images.  However, this copying process is cheaper than the former approach of “duping” images—and does not involve the loss of detail from the copying process.

6.  Easier to ship images to a stock agent. There is no longer a need to hand label slides and put them in sheets.  Instead, an artist should be able to drag a set of images into a folder and either email or FTP it to his or her agent.  If the artist has things set up right, that transfer should drag along crucial information like the artist’s name, the caption on the image, and the date it was created.  The images can get to an agent faster, too.

7.  Lower cost to produce an image. The big costs for artists to produce an image are those related to shoots (models, assistants, props, studio space) and those related to equipment (cameras, lighting, filters, etc.).  If an artist shoots 50 film images and gets five that work, but shoots 500 digital images and gets nothing useful, being digital has no real savings.  However, we don’t accept poor-quality images.  The fact that we take so many digital images, proves that our artists have figured out how to use the equipment well and strongly suggests that digital gives them a lower overall cost.

Seven to three in favor of digital image capture and processing.  In general, I think our artists will benefit from this technology.  What about stock agents and our customers?  More on that, in my next blog.

Comments

[Jim Pickerell]

While everyone is now finally moving to digital, I'm finding athat some of those have have been at it the longest are returning to film.

One of the things I am hearing is that digital is TOO SHARP. Consequently, the process of retouching all the tiny flaws in a digital image in order to make it perfect enough to meet the standards of some agencies the photographer is required to do a lot more work on a file created digitally than on one that is a scan of a film images.

For example, last week I watched a photographer work on a shot of a person that showed face and hands -- half body shot. The photographer was retouching the cuticle of the fingernails because this small area of the file was so sharp that it would be distracting when examined at several hundred percent. If this image had been shot on film and then scanned to a high resolution the grain of the film would have obscured this detail and retouching would have been unnecessary.

And, of course, if this image is eventually printed in a magazine the dot pattern in the printing process would likely obscure any flwas in the cuticle.

Quality control can be taken to extremes, but when new technology allows us to reach such extremes it is hard to set a standard at any less than reaching the maximum regardless of how much time and effort is wasted in the process.

Jim Pickerell
Selling Stock

[Bahar Gidwani]

Thanks for the comment, Jim. There are a lot of problems associated with coordinating the creation of digital images, their absorption and processing by stock agents, and their use in final products by customers. A short list includes:

1. Filters that shouldn't be applied more than once (like Sharp).
2. Formats that covert in weird ways. Some of the RAW formats are strange and wild. We are already praying that Adobe's new .DNG format takes off!
3. "up-res'd" images either from digital originals that are too small or from older, poor-quality scans.
4. Images that have been through too many format conversions (e.g., from RAW to TIFF to JPEG to TIFF or from one JPEG compression to another).

Unfortunately, most of these "problems" are not 100% things. In other words, sometimes everything works great and the client is happy. Other times, with similar oddities and processing snafus, the customer is not happy. We suspect a lot of problems are being fixed by semi-unhappy customers, who unfortunately don't always tell us they are unhappy.

I've seen proposed "standard" digital workflows. (I really should typelist some of them...I'll try to remember to do it.) They are interesting, but kind of academic when you are dealing with 1,700 artists x 800,000 images. I'd guess the practical solution for now is to suck it in and deal with the problems as they come along. By trying various solutions and making a modest number of mistakes, we probably will eventually get it "right."

Anyone else have genius on this? I'm sure we would all appreciate revealed wisdom on this subject!