iPad and android tablets will find huge application in technical art documentation and examination. They will make conservation, documentation and examination procedures faster. In this blog I report on some applications I found for my iPad to better explain the multispectral imaging features I notice on a painting in a more straightforward way to the collector or museum professional while providing my service.
This is the video summarizing this
Photos app. You can use free apps such as Photos – installed by default – to browsing your multispectral images and compare them with the actual painting while you are examining it.
A small landscape painting and iPad running multispectral images (UV Reflected) on Photos app.
Photoshop Touch app. If you have few bucks to invest I strongly suggest to install Photoshop Touch. Photoshop for iPad. You can then load your multispectral images into layers and check them overlapped on a stack. Awesome. Though, you can just upload 1024×768 pixel images. This is a big drawback and make the app unpractical for art examination, though, I wish some developer would take care of this issue???
Photoshop Touch allows you to load and stack multispectral images into layers such as you do in Photoshop.
Gigapan.com. Hosting big high-resolution images on iPad could be unpractical if you need to switch between a series of paintings. So an alternative solution is to use a web server such as Gigapan.com which allows you to upload huge images. I mean it. We are talking about giga pixel files. This turns out to be great to share images among colleagues on the internet.
Here the Gigapan Documentation of the painting below.
Gigapan.com allows you to upload giga-pixel images and share them with your colleagues. It’s amazingly fast.
IIPImage. IIPImage is an image server system for web-based streamed viewing and zooming of ultra high-resolution images and furthermore allows fading between registered multispectral images. It works on any browser both on iPad and PC. It is so far the best service I found. you have though to set up a IIPImage service on your server. Yes, you have to own a server and be a bit of a geek.
IIPImage is a useful image server and client for web-based streamed remote visualization of high-resolution scientific imagery. Edvard Munch (1895), Death Bed. Multispectral Imaging. Courtesy of the KODE museum in Bergen, Norway.
The iPad is an amazing tool. In creative hands it can be used to perform many tasks that it was not “designed” to do.
I use Apple Keynote to create small interactive presentations, which can be played on the iPad Keynote app.
Other great tools for that purpose also include Tumult Hype and of course the iBooks Author for creating fully interactive educational books.
3D scans and 3D Photomodels too look fantastic on the tablet. Swiping, rotating, panning, pinching and zooming are a very tactile experience.
What I am really missing is a solution to RTI display on the iPad. So far I have not found a solution. The iPad seems the ideal platform for interactively exploring the surface of a painting. Unfortunately, at present I have not found a way of displaying RTI. Any suggestions?
I do actually asked CHI – quite 2 months ago – about the same issue of an iPad app to run RTI models. It seems it’s not on their radar at the moment. The solution would probably be a web-server application since RTI files are too huge to be stored on the iPad itself. This function would turn useful for sharing on the web RTI models without the need to send over the big files.
I think another issue is that of the Java Applet necessary for viewing RTI files online. As far as I know the iPad does not support java applets.
Nicely done. Something a little less tech-y and smooth would still benefit conservators trying to impress. Its a bit of a “dog and pony show” but I think in many circumstances, entertaining the “client” can be of great benefit. It’s a great idea that I plan to follow through on.
Complimenti
Scott M. Haskins
Ciao Scott,
thank you for the appreciation of the blog. I agree about the “dog and pony show”. Indeed, a next needed step would be to develop specific app for art documentation. Something I was looking into with Idea.org, but we were not able to get any funding. Let me know how it goes with the iPad for your work. A presto!