Getting Organized: Database & Workflow Design For Restoration Work

Mara Sedlins:

In a project as massive as Restoring (ultimately, hopefully) All of Cerebus - or even Restoring Church and State II, for that matter - a major challenge is keeping track of all the information involved. Which pages do we have original scans for? Who sent them to us? Did they get a finder’s prize? Do we have their address? Which pages need negative scans? Of those, which ones have been scanned? What’s the quality of the negative? Which pages has Sean done the initial sharpening/adjustments on? Which ones have been cleaned? How long did it take? How many are left? And so on.

I read somewhere that step one of embarking on any creative project is preparing your workspace. Ideally you should have a (relatively) clean, clutter-free area devoted to your craft, stocked with all the materials you need, that you can just walk up to and you’re ready to go. Maybe this is more or less important depending on your particular medium and personality - but it’s certainly true for me, whether I’m trying to create something myself or contributing to an existing project. 

Before diving into a new endeavor, I want to know that I’m not going to end up duplicating work, that I won’t suddenly realize I’m missing an important tool or piece of information, that I have a plan for progressing from one stage of the project to the next and that I know where I am in that process. When the work is (almost) completely digital, the “workspace” becomes a system of strategically-named files, folders, and spreadsheets with key information organized into columns, set up to minimize redundancy and error - and to make sense to other people who need the information too.

So my first step before doing cleanup work for Church & State II was actually renaming a bunch of files to make sure that they're consistent and informative. When I sort by name, they should fall into the correct order and be easy to find. It should be obvious at a glance that these particular files are negative scans - and once I finish cleaning each file I’ll add my initials to the end so it’s clear who cleaned them. By the way, Bulk Rename Utility, despite its unglamorous interface, is a totally miraculous (and free) tool for manipulating file names in whatever ways you can imagine.

We’re still fine-tuning our Church & State II scanning/adjustments/cleanup log(s) - but here’s an example of how I tracked our progress for C & S I. By using a dropdown menu for the Status column I was able to sidestep the possibility of typos - so when I referred to these cells in formulas summarizing our progress (in separate sheets), I could be confident the information was accurate. The Notes column allowed us to communicate asynchronously about remaining issues for each page. I also tracked my work times and was able to compute average cleanup times for each type of scan (original art generally takes longer to clean than negatives, but produces a better quality image).

Though most of the restoration work (both organizational and direct work with the images) is digital, it’s helpful to have reminders along the way that the final product is going to be on the printed page. Otherwise it’s easy to obsess over pixel perfect results - and, it continues to surprise me how different the artwork looks on paper compared to the screen. So once I’m reasonably organized, I print out reference copies of the scans I’m working on, hold them in my hands with a highlighter nearby, squint my eyes a little, and mark up the priority issues I’ll focus on once I’m back in Photoshop.

This process also has the benefit of creating a feeling of satisfaction as I watch the stack of “completed” printouts start to build up ...