Processing Images

Editing

Most images that you capture with your phone or your camera will require some editing. If you’re a graduate student, faculty member, or staff member of the Department of Art and Archaeology, members of the Visual Resources team are available for one on one or small group consultations regarding image editing techniques. Some tips to get you started:

  • Always keep an original, unedited version of your image.
  • Do not be afraid to try different adjustments. Use different tools and experiment with the functions. Sometimes the automatic adjustments offer what you need. You can always go back to your original file and start all over again.
  • Be careful not to edit too much, and try to rely on batch edits and automatic adjustments when you can. If you find yourself having to change certain aspects drastically, it probably means your original images are not good enough. Some common edits that you may have to make to your images include:
    • cropping to remove certain parts of images.
    • rotating to change the orientation of images.
    • adjusting brightness and/or contrast if images are too dark or light.
    • adjusting color balance, saturation, and/or hue if the colors of images are off.
    • sharpening images if they are blurry.

Please email [email protected] to set up a meeting to discuss your image editing strategies.

Managing

Art historians and archaeologists can accumulate thousands of digital images, and such a large corpus can be difficult to keep organized. For this reason, many will rely on image management software for cataloging, viewing, and describing images. If you’re a graduate student, faculty member, or staff member of the Department of Art and Archaeology, members of the Visual Resources team are available for one on one or small group consultations regarding image management techniques. Some popular digital asset managers include:

  • Photos for MacOS, a platform which offers many great organizational tools (note, however, that those tools may not be visible in another program or on another operating system).
  • ARIES, a free and open-source platform that acts as an extension for Google Chrome (for Windows and Mac devices). 
  • Tropy, a free and open-source platform that allows you to organize and describe photographs of research material (for Windows and Mac devices). 

Remember that any platform you choose may offer a lot more than you need; focus on recording the appropriate kinds of metadata for your image while recognizing that you’ll want to supply your future self with enough information to make the images useful.

Please email [email protected] to set up a meeting to discuss your image management strategies.