Abstract

Conservation prints of cultural heritage are often produced in order to preserve the appearance qualities of the cultural heritage. The standard workflow for creating these prints is to image the cultural heritage, or paintings in the case of this thesis, under a D50 light source and create a print optimized for viewing under illuminant D50. The goal of this thesis was to investigate whether incorporating an incandescent gallery light source into the workflow had the potential to better preserve the viewer experience when the artwork is seen in an incandescent gallery.

Six prints were created through various combinations of a D50 capture, a gallery capture, a D50 optimized printing process, a gallery optimized printing process while using both complete and incomplete chromatic adaptation transforms as well as material adjustment transforms to transform between the various white points. Prints were compared through paired comparison in two experiments. The first experiment involved directly comparing the prints to the piece of cultural heritage under the gallery light source and making the judgment as to which one was the most similar to the painting. The second experiment had participants under a simulated fluorescent D50 light source making judgments as to which print looked the most similar to the painting based on their memory of the painting under a gallery light source.

Participant's judgments were analyzed using Thurstone Case V in order to create an interval scale for the workflows. No single workflow was found to be scaled higher than the all the rest, but several were judged to be more similar to the original painting than others. The workflow that used the gallery lighting for both the capture and viewing and the workflow that used a chromatic adaptation to transform from a D50 capture environment to a gallery viewing environment were judged to be the most similar to the original painting in the direct comparison experiment. The workflow that used the gallery lighting for both capture and viewing, the workflow that used a chromatic adaptation transform to transform from a gallery capture environment to the simulated fluorescent D50 viewing environment, and the workflow that used a D50 capture environment and the simulated fluorescent D50 viewing environment were all judged to be the most similar, under the simulated fluorescent D50 light source, to the participant's memory of the original painting under the gallery light source.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Art museums--Lighting; Art--Reproduction; Color vision

Publication Date

7-19-2016

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Color Science (MS)

Advisor

Roy S. Berns

Advisor/Committee Member

Mark D. Fairchild

Comments

Physical copy available from RIT's Wallace Library at TH7703 .W48 2016

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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