Last September , I had a great opportunity to take photos of the splendid paintings collection of the National Gallery of Cosenza, in the southern italian region of Calabria, with paintings of Mattia Preti, Luca Giordano, Paolo De Matteis, Pacecco de Rosa, Carlo Maratta, Sebastiano Conca, Corrado Giaquinto e Pietro Negroni and many others.
The job was very demanding. Many pieces of work showed many deeply toned areas, apparently showing no detail. Effectively, they were full of different shades, often very surprising. Furthermore, some pictures were of a very big size.
Crossed polarisation and Davide Barranca's algorythm.
I prepared a set with Massimiliano Sampaolesi,lighting up the pieces with four Elinchrom strobes and usind the crossed polarisation technique. I shot in digital using a 39mp Hasselblad digital back in multishot mode. I did my best to get smooth files with a low local contrast but with an ultra wide gamut allowing a great richness of details.
To finish off, with a Photoshop script, I layed on the master file a local contrast algorythm prepared by Davide Barranca, that allows to modulate, using a cursor the amount of local contrast. This tecnique allows to maintain full detail in highlight and shadows in a superlative way. In my view, it's an execptional technique that allows to simultate in print or in a screen the mood of the natural perception you have looking at the paintinings with a good light.
Here below you can see three details with and without the local contrast applied
High resolution
Looking at the full resolution files here below you will be able to appreciate the high level of natural sharpness and the richness of the tonal grades.
Notes:
I would like to thank Fabio de Chirico, Minister of Culture and Art and Etnoanthropologic Historian of Calabria for his kindness availability during this project.
Massimiliano Sampaolesi is my partner in Naples and with Acme 21, specialized in advanced Culture and Arts multimedia support, and special interests in many projects.. Furthermore, he is the owner of a well- known restoration firm. Among his many important works are The facade of the Cathedral of Naples, The San Gennaro Pinnacle and, recently The Teatro Sociale of Bergamo.
http://www.acme21.com
http://www.giovannaizzorestauri.com
Davide Barranca, our precious collaborator who deals with developing new techniques and algoritmi of Photoshop and other fundamental software. He holds courses and consultancy and has produced numerous interesting tutorials. He has been recently working on plugin and script on tone contrast of imaging.
to contact him
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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.