2. At Mill House Gallery, the slides and photos are carefully cleaned to eliminate dust particles.  Then we scan these images.   We have a flatbed scanner and a scanner which will accept 35mm slides, negatives, and glossy photos.  Both scanners are Hewlett Packard.

3. The scanned image is then delivered to our monitor screen by the photo processing software package (Corel's PhotoPaint 8) where we do our quality control check.   We look for obvious flaws in the image such as scratches and dust spots which are "erased" at the pixel level.

4. Next we compare our monitor's image to our source, the slide or photo, to adjust color balance, brightness, intensity, and contrast.  If we're fortunate to have the artist's original work, we are in a better position to create an excellent replica for your viewing. 

5. Since the initially scanned image is about 150 dps (dots per inch) resolution, we "resample" the image, reducing its resolution to 72dps and dimensions for placement on the web.   These variables, size and resolution, have a direct bearing on how large the image file will be.  We try not to allow the image file to exceed 50K bytes once compressed in order to allow the image file to be downloaded from our server to your PC as efficiently as possible.  The vast majority of our image files are progressive JPEG files - which display equally well on AOL's modified Microsoft browser, Netscape's Navigator, and Microsoft's Explorer.  The JPEG file format allows us to compress the actual file from the size it requires for you to view it to a smaller size for fast downloading from our server to your PC.  For example, the 1st image below is compressed from 394,216 bytes to 35,767 or 9%.  Care must be exercised to not compress an image too much else its viewing quality will deteriorate.

6. Before making the artist's paintings (image files) available for general viewing, we ask the artist to preview the images for accuracy in color matching, contrast, brightness, and intensity.  Not all our exhibiting artists have access to the Internet, but those that do can be our eyes for making the images look more like the original.  Our local artists have brought their originals in with them to better assure that our resulting image matches the original as closely as possible.

7. Many of our artists are able to capture and email images of their work to us and we rely on those artists to do the necessary color matching for us.

This painting, which was exhibited on our pages some time ago, inspired the purchase of this fine work, the buyer seeing only what you see here.  Since the buyer was us, we are able to scan the original (below) to show how closely the image from slides or photos can match the original.

The top image is very close, the noticeable difference being in the color of the ducks head and feathers. In this case we were elated to receive this work in the mail finding the original more vibrant than the slide derived image.