Digital photodocumentation

Daria Keynan <dkeynan [at] aol__com> writes

>We are a private conservation studio. We have been doing all our
>photo documentation with 35mm slides. The reason we have not
>switched to digital photography is that there does not seem to be a
>consensus about the status of digital images as legal documents.
>Nikon now markets authentication software that seems to solve the
>problem since it apparently keeps a record of alterations to an
>image. Does anyone have experience with this program or any other
>that is specifically designed to make a distinction between an
>altered and unaltered image? Have other conservators come up with
>another solution to identifying a digital image as an original
>unaltered photograph?

You might consider looking at Adobe Lightroom. This software allows
for manipulation of the image, single or in batches (it can also
develop raw files), but it doesn't touch the original file unless
specifically instructed to do so. All manipulations are retained as
metadata and can easily be reversed one by one. Altered images can
be exported as separate files. Lightroom is also great for sorting
and viewing images, and its very easy to use. It has a few bugs, but
since the current version is 1.0 I expect that these will be fixed
in the future.

Martin Juergens
Photograph Conservator
Margaretenstr. 29a
20357 Hamburg, Germany


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 21:14
                   Distributed: Tuesday, July 3, 2007
                       Message Id: cdl-21-14-006
                                  ***