Established in 1988, Envision is one of the largest Danish advertising agencies. Spread over two facilities in Aarhus and Copenhagen, the company employs approximately 120 people. Being a full service advertising agency, they cover all aspects of the communication process, from concepts and strategies, to media planning and execution. To support the creative department, the company also has its own in-house production unit.
The production of a weekly promotional flyer for Danish Supermarket, one of Envisions biggest customers, triggered the idea to look for an automated image enhancement solution. With an average of 110 pages, and approximately 10 images per page, or roughly 55.000 images per year, the need for automatic image enhancement became a necessity.
Chris Mikkelsen, premediachef at Envision explains: “With 16 photographers working for the company, we receive a lot of images that need to be processed and enhanced. Before using Claro Premedia, all image adjustments were done manually, and getting a good quality was very time consuming. You can imagine the very high pressure on the shoulders of our 4 image designers. So it was quite obvious we had to do something to lighten the workload and improve efficiency at the same time.”
When looking for a suitable solution, Envision came in touch with Thomas Holm from Pixl. As a well known Danish color management consultant, he advised Envision taking a closer look at Claro. A demo version of the software was installed. Chris Mikkelsen: “At first, Claro did not fit the bill perfectly. Internally, we only work with TIFF images, but processing TIFF images with LZW compression was initially not possible.
So, we made a temporary workaround converting images using a Switch solution. But with too many intermediate steps, the solution was not fast enough for the high number of images we wanted to process.” When a new version, supporting TIFF images with LZW compression, was presented at drupa 2008, Chris was given the green light by the management to go ahead with Claro Premedia.
When correcting images manually, forgetting to apply a necessary enhancement like sharpness can happen to even the most experienced image designer, not Claro. Corrections are always performed to the same standard, over and over again. Standards you can configure and change depending on the output requirements.
Chris Mikkelsen comments: “Claro is a wonderful application: it’s like getting a second opinion on every image. For now, our image designers still check every image after it was corrected by Claro using Elpical Claro Inspector for Photoshop®. The side-by-side viewing of original and processed versions of an image, also gives less experienced image designers the ability to learn from it. What’s more, even if you don’t entirely approve the suggested enhancement, it’s always a good basis to work from.” After having worked with Claro Premedia for almost a year now, Envision is not only very pleased with the solution, but also the cooperation with Elpical has been excellent.
Chris Mikkelsen concludes: “By using Claro, the average image quality improved dramatically, especially sharpness is a lot better than what you get in Photoshop®. Our image designers love Claro, because now, they can spend more time enhancing delicate fashion images, while the rest of the images are adjusted automatically. Thanks to Claro, we deliver a better quality, and handle more images in the same amount of time, without having to invest in extra manpower.”
