Book Description

"The dynamic range that can be captured using traditional image capture devices is limited. While an image sensor cannot capture the entire dynamic range that the human eye can see, imaging techniques have been developed to help accomplish this. High dynamic range imaging has been incorporated into digital photography pipelines to produce high-quality images with correctly exposed regions with varying illumination. The multiple exposures are fused together in post- processing. By capturing a broader dynamic range, the range of contrast captured is also increased, helping to improve color accuracy. Cultural heritage institutions face limitations when trying to capture color accurate renditions of cultural heritage objects and materials. To address this issue, spectral imaging has been an important scientific tool within their imaging process, as it allows for superior color reproduction in comparison to conventional RGB imaging, however not many institutions currently use spectral imaging as a tool. A team of software engineers at RIT have developed a software application, BeyondRGB©, to assist the colorimetric and spectral processing of six-channel spectral images. In this work, high dynamic range imaging was incorporated into the current BeyondRGB© pipeline which includes a pre-processing, processing, and rendering phase. In the current imaging process, only one exposure is taken of each artwork underneath both lighting conditions. Within the imaging process for this research, six images above and below the optimal exposures were taken creating a total of seven image sets for each artwork. The first image set is composed of one image and the seventh image set is composed of thirteen exposures. The image sets were combined using Lightroom and run through BeyondRGB© to assess color accuracy. For all six artworks, there was a lower loss in color accuracy with the incorporation of high dynamic range imaging."--Abstract.