PSNZ Honours – Projected Digital Images

I’ve been contemplating a submission of images to the Photographic Society of New Zealand Honours Board, to add a few more letters after my name!

The only way to make a submission of high quality images, for evaluation as high quality images, is to produce prints and submit prints. The option to submit ‘projected digital images’ does not offer this, because the digital files “must be submitted as jpegs, maximum 1024 pixels by 768 pixels and individual image files should be limited to 1mb or less.”  It would appear that the images are evaluated by projection using a data projector.

In my view this is inadequate for demonstrating so many quality features in a digital image, especially for evaluation for a PSNZ honour (Licentiate, Associate, Fellow). Instead the submission should be of digital files of the same or similar size as the camera capture (e.g. 10 megapixels) and at a resolution much higher than ’screen’ or ‘projector’ resolution (e.g. 300 dpi instead of 72 dpi). The maximum file size could be set to say 30 megabytes (enough space on a CD for 20 images). This way the Honours Board people can enlarge an image on a  computer monitor or during projection to evaluate the quality at the full size of the image. This is the only way to really see if an image is sharp and well exposed.

I wonder also about the file format, colour space, and bit depth, etc.  Why is it not possible to show an image of much higher quality than a JPEG in sRGB? Why not a DNG or PSD file in ProPhoto RGB at 16 bits. Surely the images submitted can be viewed in Photoshop or Lightroom. I just don’t want to create low quality JPEGs of my images which have automatically made settings that I don’t want in the image, namely (1) colour space, (2) colour temperature, (3) tonal curves, (4) compression and therefore discarding significant detail information, (5) 8 bits = only 256 levels of light luminosity instead of over 4000 levels at 12 bit, and (5) sharpening that I’ve had no control over.

Certainly a digital file submission is going to cost much less than making prints and posting them. But until PSNZ changes the rules on submitting ‘Projected Digital Images’ to lift the benchmark for the quality of such images, then in my view the respective ‘honours’ awarded is somewhat devalued. Or have I got this all wrong?

~ by markbrimblecombe on January 6, 2009.