High volume image enhancement

[BDWeaver]

Hello all,

I am doing research for an automated solution for high volume image enhancement. We need a highly customizable server solution that can handle at the most 20 thousand images in a 24 hour period. An example process might include auto-contrast, white balance, ambience or tone adjustment, sharpening, and CMYK conversion. Two solutions I have found so far are Color Factory by FotoWare and Binuscan's IPM service. Does anyone have any experience with either of these products? If so please let me know how you feel about the software and support. In addition if anyone has any other suggestion on software or companies I should look into please let me know.

Thanks!
BDWeaver

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Some thoughts include:

* Quantity over quality?

* How long is a piece of string... What file size is each image, for 20k to be processed in 24 hrs? What input file formats (compressed or not)? How much space on the server, as output files may or may not be compressed?

* White balance? Are these raw camera file format images or rendered files? Is there intact and accurate metadata in the input files? What WB setting would be required etc?

http://www.elpical.com/products/claro-premedia


Stephen Marsh

 

[BDWeaver]

Thanks Stephen,

I would say quality over quantity but not by much. We receive an extremely high volume of images over the course of 6 months and the software needs to keep up. We do not sell high end color correction. We offer image optimization. Slightly better contrast, a bit of sharpening, dark images lightened a bit and so on. Quantity is relative and if that means 2 or 3 servers running separate copies of the software then that's what we will do. That's all part of the equation we will use when we decide what to test. Currently we do this with proprietary software that is out of date/support. We are now looking for a commercial solution that we can have support on.

File sizes range wildly but are mostly under 5MB. Filetypes vary too but are mostly JPEG. We receive most of the common file types and if they are not supported we will develop a workaround.

I'm looking for any and all suggestions of possible software solutions. I'll do my homework from there and decide what warrants further investigation.

Thanks again.

 

[abc]

I'd second Elpical, great product and really good people as well.

 

[BDWeaver]

Thanks guys. I've requested a trial of Claro Premedia.

 

[Stephen Marsh]

What market are you in? Photo books and related consumer products, web to print? Magazine or newspaper publishing? Are images supplied individually or are they in final PDF files produced by a W2P artwork system from uploaded user content?

Is it 20,000 images to process in a 24 hour period or over six months?

To me, quality means a more hands on approach with at least minimal human involvement - rather than relying on a computer to analyse and optimise an image, which is more about productivity. Human involvement could be as simple as randomly comparing auto processed images to the original as a quality control step, or perhaps only for important images such as front cover images, larger sized “hero” images etc. Claro Premedia server can auto flag “problem” images for this human decision making process to happen manually.

As you say quality over quantity but not by much, I guess quantity and productivity wins - otherwise you would simply use a Photoshop based scripting or action method to batch process files for simple optimisation (contrast, sharpening, selective colour etc). One can build very sophisticated scripts and actions in Photoshop for batch processing, however it is not going to be as productive as an image server and obviously can’t deal with PDF content.

This is not my area of expertise and I have not used these products, however some other solutions that you could possibly look into include:

http://www.onevision.com/amendo.html?&gclid=CO_Hl_qRzpECFQLBPAodN27cCw

HP SmartStream Production Pro Print Server - HP - Graphic Arts - United States
http://h10088.www1.hp.com/gap/download/US_SmSproductionpro_Low.pdf
HP Labs Israel Reseach Image Enhancement

Products - Kolor-D - Klearvision Intelligent Color Server

SoftColor - Server Automata - Image Editing Automation on Server-side




Hope this helps,

Stephen Marsh

Thanks Stephen,

I would say quality over quantity but not by much. We receive an extremely high volume of images over the course of 6 months and the software needs to keep up. We do not sell high end color correction. We offer image optimization. Slightly better contrast, a bit of sharpening, dark images lightened a bit and so on. Quantity is relative and if that means 2 or 3 servers running separate copies of the software then that's what we will do. That's all part of the equation we will use when we decide what to test. Currently we do this with proprietary software that is out of date/support. We are now looking for a commercial solution that we can have support on.

File sizes range wildly but are mostly under 5MB. Filetypes vary too but are mostly JPEG. We receive most of the common file types and if they are not supported we will develop a workaround.

I'm looking for any and all suggestions of possible software solutions. I'll do my homework from there and decide what warrants further investigation.

Thanks again.

 

[BDWeaver]

Thanks again for your input Stephen. I'm in the photobook business. Images are supplied separate from the pages but we are open to the idea of processing the images in the PDF since that seems to be something that is possible with a few of the solutions I've found.

The 20k images a day is peek image receipt for one day during our busiest season. We have a six month busy cycle and during that cycle we have to keep things moving and we may have a number of weeks where we need to process 20k images a day.

We try to achieve a noticeable improvement over the original image with minimal human involvement. We do compare the original to the processed image in our quality check to decide if additional adjustments are necessary.

I greatly appreciate your input and will research your additional suggestions today. I've already setup a web conference with a local Elpical reseller to get a demo of Claro Premedia. From what I've read that seems like a very similar solution to what we have now and it offers the ability to adjust images inside of the PDFs which could be very beneficial to us if Claro Premeda can achieve an acceptable level of quality.

Regards,
BDWeaver

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Any feedback and or progress on the evaluations?


Stephen Marsh