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Africa Media Online is dedicated to the preservation of African heritage collections. Our team has accumulated a wealth of experience in working on over 100,000 images. From our base in the city of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, we carry out 2 major image digitisation services – scanning and retouching.
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ImageCapture
Digitisation of collections is vital for three reasons:
1. preservation of invaluable original hard copies
2. granting access to your collections and
3. creating income by marketing use rights to publishing markets
Designed to get large volumes of pictures online at the professional standard required by international publishing markets, Africa Media Online’s high end scanning service is a vital tool in getting valuable archives to market and preserving fragile hard copies.
Scanner
Scanning is done on the top of the range Fuji Lanovia Quattro high end flatbed scanner. What sets high end scanners off from cheaper varieties is that they can see deep into the shadow areas of an image and pull out the detail. The service is one of the few in South Africa specifically geared for RGB scanning of large image collections such as photo libraries, archives and the work of individual photographers.
Above: Francis Ntsikithi loads slide images on Africa Media Online’s Fuji Lanovia Quattro scanner. The high end prepress scanner is one of the most versatile scanners ever produced.
Scanned Images
Capturing 48-bit (16-bit per colour channel) colour scans, the high end scanner has a true optical resolution of 5000 dpi. The service can handle colour, black & white or toned images in any format: negatives and slides (from 35 mm to large format), photographic prints or other media. Our standard offerings conform to standards for archival capture suggested by such world bodies as UNESCO and by global initiatives by the publishing industry such as Pic4Press.
Security
Of great concern to us is the safety and security of image collections entrusted to our care. For this reason original images are never removed from our premises and are stored in a fire proof safe. Should your institution have a large enough digitisation project we would also come to your premises with out Mobile Digitisation Unit.
Digitisation Tracker – Quality and Efficiency
Unique to Africa Media Online is our Digitisation Tracker software which enables our staff to clearly manage the large amount of data produced by the scanning machine, do accurate quality checks and follow each image right through the process ensuring timely delivery of projects.
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ImagePerfect
Images from your collection that are commercially viable will need extra work before they can be presented to global publishing markets. ImagePerfect is our service for ensuring your images scanned by our ImageCapture service are print ready, even for the most esteemed publications.
Retouching Images
Working with the latest Adobe Photoshop tools our experienced Photoshop operators are able to clean up and retouch images to publishing standard. Every image accumulates dust or blemishes over time, and many may have got scratched over the years. Our team are able to remove these in the digital images, making it like new. Images are cropped to reflect the original. For archival collections we always maintain an untouched “raw” scan as the archival reference that one can return to in the future. Only a derivative high resolution tiff is retouched.
Colour Correction
Experienced in colour management and utilising ICC profiles, our picture editors can identify and correct colour casts and match colour to the original image utilising levels, curves and other tools in Photoshop. Depending on the client’s requirement, images are either worked on to give as accurate a facsimile of the original as possible or enhanced to give the best rendition for publishing.
Costs
Charged out at an hourly rate we work on each image for a set period of time according to the condition of the collection, usually 10 or 15 minutes. If an image is not completed in that time it is put into an Extra Work folder and the client decides whether they want our staff to continue retouching or whether they would like to complete the task themselves. The more skilled task of colour correction is done first and the more mundane, time consuming, retouching is done last. Accurate logs track work on each image from the moment of opening it to saving and clients can request that each action performed on the image is recorded. The advantage of this approach is that clients can be sure of the initial outlay and can control costs throughout the process.