Our Digital Standard & Upload Process Of Digital Art

Reading Time: 5 minutes

In this post, I would like to cover how our digital standard and our upload process works together to bring our users the most accurate quality grading creating more trust and transparency between the artist and the buyer.

Manual checking:

All types of digital works uploaded to the Blockchain Art Exchange will need to undergo manual checking after they have been graded by the computer. There are multiple reasons for this; copywrite infringement being a major one.

The process for this is simple first they will be checked against our database to see if they have already been uploaded. Next, we will perform a reverse Google image search to check that they have not be uploaded elsewhere on the web. If we find that they have, we will ask the artist to explain; for example, it may come up on the artists website in which case it would not be an issue.

The other major reason for manual checking is to check if pornography is being uploaded if it contains no artistic Merit then it will not be allowed onto the site, however this will only result in a warning not to do it again. An extension of this is to check for illegal forms of pornography such as child abuse or animal abuse, these will not be tolerated and as all uploaders will need to provide their address and identification, any user attempting to upload such imagery will be reported to their local authorities including the police and banned indefinitely from the platform.

Aside from these more serious matters manual checking will be carried out to make sure that no one has bypassed our automatic grading system.  #

Printing of digital artworks (only photos and scans of works, silly):

Artworks require at least 300 ppi/dpi to be printed, this is one of the reasons the ppi/dpi requirement of the artworks uploaded to our site is so high. As mentioned in sales of work artists will be able to pick how many editions they wish to attach to each digital artwork. This number can never be added to, only subtracted from.

 Valuation of artworks:

New artist’s uploads starting prices will be determined by an algorithm. The metrics of the upload will be the grading system for each digital standard. Different types of digital works will have a different starting valuation too. They will however not have a grading system.

The pricing will be done in order of 1 being highest and 4 being lowest. This is based purely on the cost of production of each type of digital work.

1. VR performance art
2. Video art, 3d scans and holographic art 
3. Film photography and scanned artworks
4. Digital photography and digitally created artwork e.g. Artworks made on photoshop

Un-standardized digital art:

As you scroll down you may notice that there is currently no standard for holographic art or VR performance art. This is because this is a long process to create and as It has never been done before a standard has yet to be set. This is just one of the ways in which the BAE is planning. Which we believe will be full of new artistic forms of expression all built on the infrastructure of our platform. As we develop, a standard for these will be created and our users will help us to do so.

Monitor Calibration:

Monitor calibration is essential for successful viewing. Often, when a monitor is uncalibrated, images will look completely different on one screen to another. This is a common error but can easily be fixed by a manual calibration or by using external software such as Spyder’s digital calibration system.

We especially urge users using Mac screens to calibrate their monitors before submitting their works, as these screens have a magenta shift.

For the best results if using a smart device as a gray card it should also be calibrated

Metadata:

When a user uploads an artwork it will have all sorts of metadata the B.A.E will erase all this data and replace it with the digital standard grading as well as the hash code that proves ownership of the art.

Artists notes:

Artists will have a section to create notes on each artwork these will then be displayed on the certificate. These should include any existing editions as well as the general idea of the artwork itself and anything else the artist deems important.

Issues with the process:

This process is not perfect while it works seamlessly with most forms of artwork when scanned works are used the issue arises when printing the gray card for refrence as we are converting a perfect RGB colour format to CMYK, this switch from analog to digital and then back will create some discrepancies. Half of the problem has been solved when using cameras to capture your artwork you can get a friend to hold up a smart phone with our gray card that makes it a digital to digital process and so works near seamlessly about a 3-5% in colorimetric difference depending on the screen. The main issue arises when using a flatbed scanner, as no screen is yet thin enough to fit in a scanner. we will always carry out manual checking to make sure that the images colour metrics are graded fairly.

 As time goes on we will create a dater base of images with correct gray colour codes and build a process on top of that.

Thanks for reading and if you have any questions about our digital standard feel free to leave a comment or drop us an email at Office@BAE.sg