A Copy Desk for Images

by Minla Shields

When two committees working on separate problems come up with the same solution, you know you're onto something.

Last year, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution's Pagination Committee recognized an increased need for electronic images and the specialists to handle them. At the same time, our Quality Control Committee recognized the weakness of our existing workflow, where designers and layout editors sent photos of inconsistent quality to a production group that was not empowered to make the necessary changes.

Both groups recommended solving these problems in the same way--by creating a central entity responsible for the quality of editorial images. It would be, in essence, a copy desk for photographs.

So, in October 1995, the newsroom and production each contributed three staff members to create an "Image Control Desk." The new department is located in the newsroom, and staffers report to the assistant managing editor for news operations.

Image Control became an opportunity for employees whose traditional jobs were changing. We were gratified with the response to the job posting--applicants ranged from a pressroom worker to a marketing artist.

We provided the desk with state-of-the-art equipment, including three Power Mac 8100s and one Power Mac 8500. All of the machines run Photoshop and Imagespeed (our graphics-database client from Digital Technology International, provider of our pagination software), and one of them has a Mac/Leaf card. On another machine we also run Color Access from Pixelcraft, which is CMYK color-separation software. We have an HP Scanjet 4C for flatbed scanning and an HP MV4 printer for black-and-white proofs.

Like many newspapers, ours is produced on multiple platforms as we migrate away from old systems and toward full pagination. Atex users draw pages on paper dummies, and Mac users design in Quark or DT's Pagespeed. We use the DT system for our suburban zones, Business and Editorial sections and some features midruns. We have photos in Leaf for non-paginated sections and photos in our DT Graphics Database for paginated sections. We have also begun an extensive archive of electronic images using the Graphics Database. The Image Desk maintains paths for all of these photos.

Benefits of the System:

Instead of 30 photographers, we now have six technicians judging quality. We now have a consistent point of enhancement that can assure quality is maintained.
All newsroom designers and copy editors bring their work to Image Control instead of toning their own photos. This saves them time and shifts the work to the people trained to do it.
Because of the background of our Image Control staff, we have fostered greater cooperation between production and the newsroom in finding solutions to problems.
We have begun to make CMYK separations on some high-resolution images to be placed on Quark and DT pages. Because the images do not have to go to Scitex first, we save time. We are also positioning ourselves for direct-to-imagesetter work in the future.
We provide a good copy of all images that appear in the newspaper for the archive. In doing so, we assure the consistent quality of images going in and, therefore, the future value of our database. We also save photo librarians time that would be spent collecting images from multiplesections.
We now have the ability to centrally maintain a "look" for the images in our paper.

We believe we are unique in having employees from production as part of the newsroom. We also believe that by reacting to the necessary changes in traditional roles created by new technology, we have developed a more efficient system.

Minla Shields is manager of Atlanta's Image Control Desk. E-mail, mshields@ajc.com; phone, (404) 582-7099; fax, (404) 526-5746.