Good Picture 2015: Imaging Illuminated

On Saturday 12 December 2015, the Imaging Science Group of the Royal Photographic Society held another in its series of Good Picture tutorial seminars.

This was the 13th in our series of annual Good Picture symposia. The aim of these lectures and discussions is to provide imaging practitioners, keen amateurs and students with insights into Digital Imaging and provide some tools and guidelines for assessing cameras and output.

The programme is detailed below together with links to some of the papers presented. These have been made available by kind permission of the authors. More may be added if and when the files become available to us.

Programme

Alan Cooper: Fitting Photographs Together
RPS 3D and Holography Group
Different combinations of digital displacement and rotation of images, alignment, magnification adjustment, and tonal control provide not only the photographer and microscopist, but also the artist, with High Dynamic Range (HDR), panoramas and tiling, aligned stereoscopic pairs and  almost unlimited depth of field. For astronomers, automatic registration can beat telescope tracking in accuracy. For the artist – new fields for creativity.

Adrian Davies MSc ARPS: Digital Photography of Plants Using Ultraviolet Reflected and Fluorescence Techniques
Freelance Photographer
The presentation will highlight the issues involved with the digital photography of plants using ultraviolet radiation, both reflected and fluorescence. The results are starting to reveal new insights into the world  of plants and their flowers.

Dr. Neil J Murray: Measuring Space Radiation Damage from Artefacts in Comet 67P Images 
Centre For Electronic Imaging, The Open University
An abundance of images returned from the European Space Agency Rosetta mission reveal artefacts of bright-dark pixel pairings that allow the nature and location of radiation damage sites in the CCD array to be understood and corrected for in post-processing. The annoying presence of these artefacts in cometary images are a mere consequence of the power constraints of Rosetta, however unbeknown at the time, a similar but deliberate scheme was recently developed and adopted into the ESA Euclid mission to probe these effects, allowing for far greater precision astronomy. The Rosetta mission accidentally provides unique and real data of space radiation damage effects over a period of 10 years that will provide valuable insight into future space based missions.

Jonathan Mather: 360° Photography of Objects Using a Smartphone
Tupel Ltd.
360° photography can add extra sensations of depth and realism.  I’ll talk about my efforts to simplify the process of making such images and sharing them online. I look forward to showing you the results, and the technique for making your own. In addition to the PDF version of the paper (download link given above), there’s also a PowerPoint version available, including videos, which can be downloaded here. Please note this is a 30Mb download and you need to have MS PowerPoint installed.

Prof. Francis Ring DSc ASIS FRPS: A Glimpse Into The World of Medical Imaging
University of South Wales, Pontypridd
In recent years many new imaging technques have become of great value in medicine, extending the investigation and observation of the Physician and surgeon. This includes the expansion of special techniques in medical photography and whole body scanners such as computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging. With computer technology also, colour has added new dimensions creating amazing images that would have astounded physicians a century ago.

Piewen Yu: A Study of Wide Colour Space For Production of Photorealistic Digital Prints 
Department of Colour Science, University of Leeds
This project focused on printing inkjet dye-based photo-realistic images using sRGB, Adobe RGB (1998) and Prophoto RGB colour spaces.Colour measurement was undertaken on the colour panels of a GretagMacBeth® colour checker chart, following printing in the three colour spaces.In addition, equivalent multi-component test images were also printed and utilised for a standard observer test to ascertain whether a wider colour space image was deemed to be more preferable.

Graham Diprose ARPS ABIPP: An Alternative Approach to Conserving Digital Images Into The 23rd Century
London’s Found Riverscape Partnership
While archives and individuals digitise their older photographs for wider access online, digitised data files may not survive any longer than the artifact being copied, while ‘born digital’ data may well have a much shorter life expectancy than a Victorian print or 1960’s colour slide.  We cannot predict how often digital image data will need to be migrated from one file format, or storage system, to another, nor the risk of losses from obsolescent software and media, ‘bit rot’ or human error. This presentation proposes archiving our most vital images.