Application of Digital Image Enhancement in Rock Art Recording

121 Computers have long been useful in rock art site recording and database management. More recently, techniques for stitching overlapping photographs to create panoramas or mosaics of panels or entire sites have been developed for site documentation. This was discussed in detail by Mark and Billo (1999). Current techniques have advanced due to new software packages that add spherical and cubic projections (e.g. REALVIS Stitcher). Digital images can be linked to the site locations with GIS software such as ArcView (Harry et al. 2001:154–156). In order to improve the quality of imagery we have developed digital image enhancement techniques using Photoshop.TM Other researchers have reported on multivariate manipulation of multiband images using Idris software (Buchner et al. 2000) The emphasis of this paper will be on describing those digital techniques used to enhance digital or digitized photographs. We rely on the use of Adobe Photoshop, and assume that the reader is generally familiar with this software. Significant information about rock art such as details of elements or pigments can sometimes be obtained from the color information in photographs (Mark and Billo 2001). Photoshop allows for alternate color spaces, CMYK, and Lab in addition to RGB (Red, Green, Blue). Application of Digital Image Enhancement in Rock Art Recording