SCRC Digital Lab upgrades to Capture One 8 software

Imaging technician works at Phase One mounted camera workstation

The Special Collections Research Center Digital Lab recently upgraded to the Capture One 8 software for cultural heritage imaging created by Digital Transitions. This edition offers several new features that significantly enhance existing workflows, including automatic and batch cropping, improved color rendering, and profiles for positive and negative film stock.

35 mm slide and mount from the Karl Raitz Kentucky slides collection

The Digital Lab has already utilized the Capture One 8 software to process (crop and straighten) thousands of newspaper pages digitized between 2010 and 2012. Previously, this work was outsourced to a company that completed the work by hand. The new software allows all processing work to be accomplished in-house with minimal technician involvement. These newspaper images and their accompanying metadata will be uploaded to the Internet Archive and made available via the Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program website https://kdnp.uky.edu/.

Front page of The Courier-Journal, March 15, 1903

The Capture One 8 software has also been used with the Phase One camera to digitize a collection of 35mm slides. A comparison to previous workflows show that the new software renders the color and contrast more truthfully to the original slide. Imaging technicians are able to digitize slides in less than half the time of previous methods, and the new software also allows capture of the descriptive information included on the slide mount as well as the slide image.