Gannett Co. Inc. said it will complete the consolidation of its photo-toning operations into two regional processing centers by year’s end.

The centers, in Indianapolis and Des Moines, Iowa, are already processing photos sent by more than 50 of the publisher’s 85 U.S. newspapers, said Toni Humphreys, director of Gannett’s Regional Toning Centers. Gannett’s additional papers, except for USA Today, will follow suit in the coming months.

Gannett opened the centers to help it more efficiently deal with the thousands of photos it produces and receives each week. The sites are centered on Agfa’s Intellitune image-enhancement software. Agfa engineered the app to analyze the tone, color and spatial characteristics of images and then automatically apply the necessary corrections for accurate press reproduction.

Automation and efficiency

“Through this consolidation we’ve had to find ways to automate and become more efficient and that’s what we’ve done with Intellitune,” Humphreys said.

“Part of the challenge is that we’ve got 70 print sites out there and every press is different, so we’ve had to find a way to apply profiles that don’t allow room for operator error.”

The consolidation will help Gannett better manage image toning for the more than 130,000 images the publisher’s papers receive and produce each week.

Humphreys said Intellitune has been able to address many of the challenges associated with automating the publisher’s photo toning process — including receiving photos from a variety of staff photographers and dealing with disparate hardware in the field — and Gannett has even been able to customize the software to automate specific tasks, such as engineering the app to apply press profiles based on where a photo comes from.

“We’ve also built in some automation for bulk images, such as houses and cars, where we can zip a file, dump it into a script in Intellitune and it will unzip all of the images, tone them, apply the right profile and zip them back up for the operator,” Humphreys said.

All of Gannett’s artwork, including PDF advertising files, goes through Intellitune.

Newspapers send the files to the appropriate RTC via Group Logic’s MassTransit app, which is also used to send the toned images back.

“In Des Moines right now we’re transmitting to 50 newspapers at the same time,” Humphreys said. “I guess it’s kind of an FTP on steroids.”

Photo archiving integration

Gannett is also integrating photo toning with its Digital Collections’ photo archiving software. That integration will allow the photo editor building a page to select an image out of the archiving app, send it to the appropriate RTC for toning and then return it into the paper’s front-end system.

“A little window pops up and asks them if they want the photo color or black-and-white, and when they hit export, that photo automatically comes to the toning center, it’s toned and it pops up in their front-end,” Humphreys said. “That’s all automated.”

Humphreys said in addition to performing well, the use of the Intellitune app at the two RTCs has afforded Gannett significant labor savings and efficiency.

“We were consolidated before in that one newspaper might tone for two or three other papers, but this is national.”

Gannett created a training manual for all of its newly hired operators, which Humphreys said has been very beneficial.

“Even if they’re experienced from other Gannett locations, we’re putting them through a pretty intensive two-week training program on how to tone images and how the whole system works,” she said.

In early October, Gannett was toning about 50,000 images per week between the two RTCs. Humphreys said she expects that number to increase to upwards of 130,000 per week once all of the publisher’s 85 titles begin transmitting their photos.