SCREAMING The images and the OCR of the table of contents is complete!!!! I just need to do the metadata, packaging, distributing, and presenting, surely not in and of themselves giant pr5ojeifhweu feqw and yes these are the VERY LIGHTLY 'compressed' 10000px copies, the uncompressed full size master copy is 1.65GB lmaaaao
This has been something of a journey in thinking about how to archive, why, what, and the ultimate job of someone like me, trying to share a representation of a thing.
The original 2001 scans were not made with archives in mind. It's just not what we were about. What it was about was that back then, ANY artwork you saw online likely had to be scanned from an artbook, screencapped, or otherwise made from some other original--digitizing content was still new and unusual--although not unheard of.
(The other large batch of Saito's art available at the time was a CD-ROM!!! The Chiho Saito Key Art Gallery CD-ROM included video commentary on some key pieces, which WE DID IN FACT GET TRANSLATED, CHECK OUT CHIHO SAITO'S AWKS 1998 CD-ROM COMMENTARY YEP IT'S LIKE THAT. It struggled with the same thing I did--digitally representing artwork at the time was not as easy, and tended to result in some truly horrendous images.)
Anyway, back then, the goal was less to flawlessly represent the product and more to flawlessly present artwork for use in digital projects--essentially, my goal was to create clean and perfect raws from which to create websites, winamp skins, etc. That goal, combined with the general lack of capacity to do better, means that my original scans of this artbook are like over-compressed audio. To look good on the screens of the day, the images were over-saturated and the blacks and whites, highs and lows so to speak, got cut off. Also, the file sizes were a concern at the time, resulting in a willingness to lose those fine details for a version that could be distributed online. (Obviously also it's a resolution thing--but not much needs to be said about 1250px holding less information than 10000.)
This time, the goal is fidelity to the actual artwork by Chiho Saito. This is probably a controversial choice from a strict archival perspective--I *should* be trying to flawlessly represent the actual pages of the book:
And sure. That'd still be amazing, and more 'honest.' However, I am not an archiver, I'm a hobbyist doing what I fuckin' want, and what I want is the best means to celebrate the absolutely incredible talent of Chiho Saito, as an artist, using the means available to me: incredibly high quality print reproductions of her work, and incredibly powerful imaging tools and experience to tease the most information about the original from the print given to me. Essentially? COMPUTER. ENHANCE.
This is like, maybe a square inch or two or actual content as she painted it. But you can zoom in so far now that you can see how the white strokes, the final touches, never create solid lines--the touch is that light, over a very lightly rippled surface. You can see the rainbow of colors she uses to create the depth of the folds in the cloth, and you can even tease out how they got layered. IDK, I don't really fuck with any other fandoms, but I do think this level of fidelity is rare to see in digital representations of manga artwork that predates profession transfer for digital releases. (And even then--you rarely get your official manga artwork in 10k.)
Sure, I could give you the print moire versions of these, but in a digital format, where you can zoom in far beyond the illusion the print moire creates on paper, the details in the information become fundamentally lost to the eye. I've learned a lot over the years about finding those details, knowing how to tease out scan dust from what's actually there, and so on and so forth. I guess, as someone who has spent over 20 years photoshopping, archiving production artwork, scanning tens of thousands of pages, and also as someone who has seen some of these originals in person... this is an ultimate use of my skills to create something no one else is likely to do, including the creators of the work.
oh hey I ranted on for no reason except I need to mentally dump the last 10 hours of work anyway these are uh, coming soon ig I just wanted to talk more about them
