BRUUN RASMUSSEN - OPTIMIZING THE IMAGE WORKFLOW

Background

Bruun Rasmussen Auctioneers of Fine Art is among the largest auction houses in the world and the leading auction house in Scandinavia.

The first Bruun Rasmussen auction took place in 1948 in the now famous action house “Bredgade” in the heart of Copenhagen. Today Bruun Rasmussen comprises three large auction houses in Denmark.

Digital images are used everywhere in a modern auction house. Besides being used in the printed catalogs, digital images are also used on web pages and by internal users such as experts and librarians.

The challenge

The printed catalogs are Bruun Rasmussen’s primary marketing tools.
Time-to-market and production cost of these catalogs are crucial factors in a competitive marketplace.

With 10.000 new images being printed in 80 catalogs every year, the time spent and costs associated with image preparation and handling was considerable.

All images were already captured digitally at Bruun Rasmussen’s own studios. The digital image files were then sent to an external repro company for color correction and color separation in the same way that transparencies used to be handled.

This step was a serious bottleneck in the catalog production and since the repro company had no reference image such as a transparency, all color corrections had to be based on educated guesses.

To lower the cost and shorten the production cycle for catalogs, Bruun Rasmussen wanted to optimize the image workflow by automating as many tasks as possible, without sacrificing image quality.

It was a key requirement that the new solution should be able to automatically repurpose images and make them available from within the many specialized applications developed internally by Bruun Rasmussen.

The solution

By implementing the “Single Source Dynamic Imaging” concept the number of variations that needs to be created and maintaned for each image has been reduced to a single RGB master-image. From this master-image derived versions for printing, web and other uses are automatically created by the eRez Imaging Servers on-demand.

Because all derived image versions are automatically created in a predictable manner and according to Bruun Rasmussen’s standards, the individual photographers are now fully in charge of the image quality.

Many image related tasks such as conversion, indexing and publishing have been fully automated using the eRez SOAP SDK.

The results

“The production cycle has been shortened considerably and we no longer have to rely on costly external repro work” says IT Manager Jakob Dupont. “With eRez we now have a robust and flexible imaging platform that quickly adopts to our present and future needs”.

“We can now use the same master-image in the catalogs, on our web sites and from within all our applications without having to make a single manual conversion. The eRez Imaging Server does that automatically. Acquiring the right rendition of an image is just as simple as acquiring numbers and text from a database.

eRez’s built in image browser allows our internal experts to quickly view images and zoom into areas of particular interest, which saves a lot of time.

We often send copies of our images to the press and other interested parties. With eRez we can quickly download an image at the right quality and format and send it off.
Likewise, photographers can use the upload feature to add new images from an external location in a secure manner.

As an extra bonus backing up image data is greatly simplified because the master-images are placed in well defined areas and we don’t need to backup all the derived versions of each image”

In conclusion, Jakob says, “We are now in full control of the entire image workflow, right from when the image is first captured in our studio till the final pages of a catalog is sent to the printer. The eRez software has adapted very well to our needs - not the other way around”.