About seventy ivories from the twelfth century school of Amalfi, represent images from the Old and New Testament; these are kept at the San Matteo Diocesan Museum in Salerno. They are very finely hand carved and they have a unique charm, but, up to this day, they are still pratically unknown. A wonderful exhibit, "The Medieval Ivories Enigma", introduced them to the public.
How I worked
The ivory carvings, especially the series from the New Testament, are finely carved and incredibly rich of details. For this reason I used a very high resolution, up to 88 megapixel, in order to make the pictures more enjoyable and fully espress the originals. I wanted to keep the full effect of the materials, but the enlargement highlighted the cracks and the damages caused by time, in such a great deal, that the carvings were disfigured. So I worked on the images with some very effective special filters that restored the original beauty of the ivories without altering the information contained.
Salerno ivory carvings video
The pictures have been presented with an incredible successful charming soundtrack that gave the audience great enthusiasm which I've never experienced before.
Massimiliano Sampaolesi and the ACME21
Lately I have been working a lot in Naples and Salerno. I have also created with Massimiliano Sampaolesi, a bright and eclectic Neapolitan restorer, Acme 21, a company that provides advanced multimedia services for Cultural Assets. Even if it's been active for a short while, Acme has already reached important goals. For example, the Ministry for Cultural Assets and Activities included Salerno ivories collection in the project “Magnifico”, with the intention of promoting excellency in the field of art.
A simple yet powerful Photoshop tool to effectively boost the local contrast of an image, by means of a smart algorithm which avoids the clipping issues typical of methods like shadows/highlights. The user interface is simple and clean, with just one slider, allowing the user to customize the effect in a straightforward way.
In 2000 Imacon, now Hasselblad, created a new proprietary format for the Imacon scanners, the Flexible File Format or fff. 3F has determined the biggest revolution in the field of original analog scanning since the introduction of the drum scanner.
First of all forgive us the word play, which might come off as presumptuous. However, we felt like we came up with something that perfectly summarizes our philosophy in this arena by uniting the concepts of high resolution and quality reproduction.