Art Issues:
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The woodcuts were printed
black on white, but with age the paper has turned to a toasted
beige, due to acid content, and the ink is a warm black. Although
the raw scans look soft at this scale, the thumbnails are
a fair representation of the original woodcuts. Bumping up
the contrast and brightness to approach black and white, such
as Dover's fine reprints of nineteenth century woodcuts, would
restore the initial look of the woodcuts, but they would still
lack the drama that is possible and that Moran's water colors
and oils have. By working in RGB, LAB,and CMYK, duotone, tritone,
and quadtones, using masks, applying a wide variety of photo-editing
tools (curves, levels, color balance, hue and saturation),
and a fair amount of hand work reconstructing lines and cleaning
up spaces, we were able to give the woodcuts new life without
the artificiality so often associated with hand tinting. Each
reprint is about 300% larger than the original wood cut. We
could have gone larger, but the new tones would have been
more obvious and we felt that this was the optimal size for
this project. |