Automatic Image Processing of Exif-JPEG News Photos – Part II (01.2009)

1/2009

Williams, Andy

Automatic image processing is an important tool that can help save resources, streamline the workflow and enhance news reporting. Newspapers are using their multimedia publishing potential to publish the very latest news stories and pictures at their disposal. At the same time, increasing volumes of digital pictures flow from photographers, reporters, agencies and private individuals into the news network with some news organisations handling more than 10,000 pictures per day. For the web, more pictures per story and still photo documentaries can make reading and viewing the news even more attractive than print. Indeed, the number of media platforms, which includes all the different forms of mobile devices, is increasing and many of them require their own image resolution and formatting styles. Developments in automatically improving the quality of real-life digital images continue. Regardless of whether the picture is a JPEG-, TIFF-, RGB-, CMYK- or greyscale variant, it can be processed automatically by the leading image processing systems. Particularly if the image is in a commonly used RGB file format, there is already a wide range of software that can perform batch or hot folder automatic image processing to achieve a better image quality on a high number of these images. In all cases, an optimised RGB image is the foundation for good colour on the screen or a conversion to CMYK and a pleasing printed reproduction on newsprint.