Visual Resources Center Blog

Even though the OtisDID can search for text with accents and diacritics (by browsing and by adding a tilde ~ character to the end of a word), it was still somewhat difficult to find images by Cézanne and Dalí. For instance, a search for “cezanne~” produced results with Cézanne and Suzanne.

So, bowing to user pressure, I have changed these two artists’ names to their plain, unaccented versions. A keyword search for “cezanne” will now get 80 hits instead of 3.

Please let me know if you have any search difficulties with the Otis DID. We are constantly updating the data, adding images, and adding new search terms.

Last night there was a segment on CBS’s 60 Minutes about the search for the lost Battle of the Anghiari by Leonardo da Vinci. Link to story and video.

Maurizio Seracini, the scholar obsessed with radiography and Leonardo, gave the keynote speech at the recent VRA conference in San Diego, CA. He spoke about his quest to find the lost painting as well as the history of using x-rays to uncover new information about art. His talk was quite fascinating. We have one of his books, Leonardo: The European Genius: Paintings and Drawings, which will be able for check-out later this year.

If you don’t want to watch the video online, it will be distributed via Amazon (and is the source of the photo).

There are many web sites devoted to Photoshop. Here are two of my favorites.

Photoshop Disasters - a site that finds commercial images that were clumsily, badly tweaked.

Curves Cereal box	Parenting Cover

Worth1000.com - Each week the site has a new contest. Here is one on Counterfeit Art 12. The site invites people to change a famous work of art by adding glaring anachronisms, changing the layout, etc. It must all be done in Photoshop.

Monet Portrait by Calumis	Bat-Napoleon by RebelD0g

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, recently launched a new site for their exhibition archives from 1983-2003: http://www.moca.org/library/archive/exhibition/

Based on a traditional archival finding aid, the site is visually oriented. Each exhibit record contains installation photos as well as container lists. Check it out!

Have you ever wanted to use Photoshop at home but were too cheap to buy it? Me too. Now Adobe has released a beta version of a new service for us: Adobe Photoshop Express. It is a free web-based site where you can upload images, tweak them with a limited version of the Tool Palette, and share them with friends and web sites.

Although Adobe is getting into the web-based photo sharing site a little late, it has major brand recognition. Plus, you can even edit photos that you have already uploaded to some of those other photo sharing sites.

What’s Good:

• Free!
• Web-based, so
  • Doesn’t matter if you are on a Mac or PC
  • Can access your images when you are traveling
• Easy to flip, rotate, remove red eyes, distort, etc.
• 2 GB of free storage
• Can edit your images already uploaded on Facebook, Photobucket, and Picasa

What’s Not:

• Can only upload JPEG files, no TIFFs, GIFs, BMPs, etc.
• Still in Beta, so some features are not working properly
• No print function

More information here: Adobe Photoshop Express FAQ

To sign up, just go to http://www.photoshop.com/express. Please note that you will need to have Flash Player 9 installed to access the site.

P.S. If you find Photoshop Express too limited and Photoshop CS3 too expensive, there is another option: Adobe Photoshop Elements which costs $90-100.

We have added two new remote collections of images to the OtisDID that members of the Otis community may use in their slideshows, etc. One is of images of illustrations of the Civil War era (from Allan Kohl at MCAD), the other is of English Architecture from 1100-1800 CE (from Sara Nair James at Mary Baldwin College).

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CoolIris has some fun widgets for the Firefox browser, especially PicLens. When you are on Google Images, Flickr, and other sites, you can browse the images as a full-screen slideshow as well as a huge wall of pictures.  You can view the results as a slideshow

Unfortunately it does not work with the OtisDID. Also, you cannot click on an image to get to its page. This widget is for browsing and viewing, not finding.

The widget is available for Macs and PCs.  Try it out!

Many wonderful and hard to find series have been released on DVD … and are available for borrowing in the Library. Gems include:

• Berlin Alexanderplatz - Video V F377 B46 Discs 1-7
• Twin Peaks - Complete Series (plus Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me) - Video T T84 Discs 1-10 and Video F T846
• The Jazz Singer - Video F J39 Discs 1-3
• Looney Tunes Golden Collection, volume 5 (we also have volumes 1-4) - Video AN L666 Vol. 5 Discs 1-4
• Popeye, the sailor, 1933-1938 - The original Max Fleischer versions - Video AN P6639 1933-1938 Discs 1-4

We also have a bunch of new-ish releases, including The Simpsons Movie (Video AN S5658), Transformers (Video F T7259), The Namesake (Video F N3557), and Paprika (Video AN P267). More titles updated daily! at New Videos List.

As always, check the Library Catalog to find out if someone else has already checked it out.

As the Fall semester comes to a close, the Spring  quickly approaches. Please let me know what image and video needs you might have for next year. The sooner I begin gathering the materials, the more likely they will be cataloged in time for your class.

As a bonus, here is a silly animated version of the Bayeux Tapestry. Watch the Normans prepare for conquest! See William eat! Cheer (or hiss) while Harald and Lewine die!

DePauw University’s Visual Resource Center has created a series of videos to introduce themselves. They parody Apple’s Mac vs. PC commercials by pitting the VRC vs. Google Images. Lucky for us, they are posting them on YouTube. Although they use different resources than we do at Otis, the basics are the same.

Here is the second video in the series: Librarian.