Astropad Studio Functioning as a Bridge Between Tablet and Laptop While Documenting the Late-Roman Murals at Luxor Temple

Continued from PART FOUR...

Digital image creation and processing have evolved immensely in the past few years, bringing a plethora of new solutions that can be considered as a digital substitute for creating backgrounds for field documentation purposes. One of the most promising technological achievements that were eventually utilized in documenting wall scenes was photogrammetry. The software Metashape enables photogrammetric processing of digital images that can be applied to generate a flat, perspective corrected orthomosaic rendering of large wall segments, producing complete coverage of entire walls in high resolution.

With our photogrammetry solution, developed by Survey photographer, Owen Murray, the cumbersome photo enlargements could be exchanged for extremely accurate digital photographs, providing us with color backgrounds for the first time in the Survey’s history.

However, these newly generated digital backgrounds were too large to be used in a native iPad app without considerable downscaling or cropping. To avoid these unnecessary complications and to be able to use the developed cross-hatching technique on digital layers, the Survey decided to initiate another radical step in the process: dragging a studio computer to the field. The entire documentation process prospered immensely by having studio-grade software and a powerful computer at the temple.

With the help of Astropad Studio, functioning as a bridge between tablet and laptop, we were able to create a makeshift Wacom replacement that is versatile enough to be moved around in front of the wall. Tethered to a laptop computer via Astropad, the artist was able to work on final layers in the desktop version of Photoshop, eliminating the need for or reducing the time spent with studio work in certain cases.

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