Contents
Introduction
I started collecting these images a few years ago, thinking that I could use them in the preparation of Books for this website. I soon found that the resources available exceeded all expectations.
At that time, I realized there were more pictures than I would likely ever use, and I wanted to find a way to share them freely with others. Eventually I settled on the Flickr website.
Albums
The Images from each Book are in their own Album on Flickr. You can view and download them here: Bible Images
However, these are only the 10,000 or so images that I have had time to complete. There are about 100,000 in the full collection so far. If anyone would like to download:
- the unfinished albums; or
- the pictures with their original names (downloading from Flickr causes the file to have a generic name); or
- the complete finished albums as a folder;
–they can be downloaded from my shared OneDrive folder: Full Unfinished Collection
Copyrights
All the pictures taken from the Archive.org website are public domain and free for any use. There are some folders in the unfinished collection from Museum websites that might have different copyright terms. If you intend to use them for commercial use, please check the terms on the source website. These Museum images are very high quality. They can be downloaded from a shared OneDrive folder (see link in next section).
These are the Museum folder names:
- BlakeArchive.org
- British Museum
- Cleveland Art
- Hollar (U of Toronto)
- Library of Congress
- Met Museum
- Morgan Library
- Museum of NZ
- National Galleries of Scotland
- National Gallery of Art
- Rijksstudio
- Wellcome Collection
There is usually a “source.txt” file in the root of the folder, giving the website location. Institutions like Rijksstudio (in Netherlands), Met Museum (New York), and Wellcome Collection (London) have so much material, I’ve only downloaded a small portion of it. There are thousands more pictures to obtain from those sources yet, so you might want to search them for yourself.
Among the Unfinished Collection on OneDrive, there are also these two folders from some European members of my church:
- Heinrich Halman
- Joannas Bible Pics
These should not be used for commercial publications, and are not available for website use either. You can use them for personal PowerPoint shows, or for teaching purposes, or for background pictures, printing and hanging on walls, etc.
History
About half a year ago, I was working on two volumes of collected articles on the Gospels, and the life of Christ. To fill some of the blank spaces, I went hunting for some pictures, especially older ones, as I didn’t want to deal with copyright hassles.
I poked around on Archive.org, and found quite a few resources of old books. I downloaded the “Processed JP2” versions, which are the original camera snapshots of each page, cleaned up a bit. These offer the highest resolution. As I began cleaning these up, so as to make a collection I could draw on for the volumes on Christ’s life, I found more, more, and yet more books and artwork.
I currently have about 800 books with Bible artwork, most of them being of relatively good quality. I’ve been sorting, titling, and cleaning up these pictures for the last few years, on and off. As I worked on these, my mind was carried into the Bible stories, and they became more fixed in my mind, and more lively. So I think there is a blessing in this work.
However, there are also sometimes misconceptions and even myths put into the pictures. I have left out some that were unsuitable: either because they misrepresented the Bible stories, mixing them up with mythology, or because they were not modest, or because they covered the Apocrypha, or some mythical New Testament events that are taught in the Catholic church traditions, but are not found in the Bible.
If anyone desires to see the items that were left out of my collection, they can look up the original sources on Archive.org. The Archive.org Identifier is included in the description of each Album at Flickr. You can search on this identifier at Archive.org to find the original source.
Technical Info
Format
Except in the case of color pictures (which I saved as JPG), most of the black and white, or grayscale images were reduced to 16 colors (and saved in PNG format), so that I could make the background a pure white again (instead of the tint of the yellowed paper). This way they also are more suitable to a book printed on white paper.
For a graphics editor, I’ve used mainly the free software, IrfanView. Occasionally I used Gimp to do some further editing.
When reducing the background color to white, sometimes, if the page was very mottled or yellowed, some fine details in the picture might also be lost, because they have faded, and the background has darkened, to the point where there is not much color difference between them. Usually this is negligible. But if someone wants to spend the time to do a more detailed cleanup in order to preserve or restore every detail, they would have to get the originals and do this work themselves. Unfortunately, I am limited in time, and have aimed for practical usefulness, rather than pixel perfection.
Cropping
In most cases, I have cropped the images out of their original borders. So the user will have to supply their own bordering if they are using the pictures for publishing. Adding borders to images is included in most modern word processors (MS Word, LibreOffice Writer, etc) and all publishing programs.
My reason for cropping off the borders is that often the original border was very rough and broken. As well, because of the curvature of the page when the book was scanned, the images are not usually rectangular, if they even were in the original books. So it was just more convenient to crop out an actual rectangle, so that the images are made even again.
Another reason for cropping off the original borders, is that often the area just next to the border would have a mixture of color and black, due to the yellowing of the page. Without pure white, it is not possible to auto-crop right to the border. Without auto-cropping being available, it would be very tedious and time-consuming to manually crop as close to the border as possible. There are, of course, a few exceptions to the rule, such as when the borders were not rectangular (circular images, or odd shapes).
Clean up
In some older pictures, there are scratches and specks that show up throughout the image. I have lacked the time to do the tedious cleanup work for all the images. Some of them (especially the ones I have used in books) have been cleaned up to remove stray pixels, but this is not the case for the majority of the images.
Titles and Organization
Within the individual books, I have grouped the images into folders. Mainly these are “Nt” for New Testament, and “Ot” for Old Testament, but there are also folders such as “Places,” “Animals,” “Plants,” and so forth.
Within the “Ot” (Old Testament) and “Nt” (New Testament) folders, I’ve numbered the pictures chronologically, wherever possible. For those books that did not specify a Bible book/chapter for the images, I have numbered them according to the order of occurrence (historically), although there is some uncertainty about some events, such as when the events in the book of Job took place. Also, I have not attempted to do a chronological ordering of the first five books (the books of Moses), but have treated them as if they were in chronological order (Genesis first, Exodus next, etc).
Steps to Cleanup Images in IrfanView
For those who want to try their hand at cleaning up some of the images from the “Unfinished Collection” on my shared OneDrive folder, or who may be curious as the steps I use to clean up old grayscale images from books, here are the steps. These are done in Irfanview, the free viewer/editor software. I’ve included the Shortcut keys in brackets. Once you learn these, it goes much faster:
- Straighten the picture if needed (Ctrl-U). Actually there is a faster and more accurate way. Press F12 to open the Toolbox, and look for the Straighten/Rotate tool. Click it, then use the mouse to draw a line along one of the horizontal or vertical lines in the picture. The picture will auto-straighten to match your line. Close the Toolbox when done.
- Crop if needed. I usually crop inside the outer frame of the picture, as it can be a pain to deal with. Cropping is done by dragging the mouse from top left to bottom right, then adjusting the lines with the mouse before pressing Ctrl-Y to complete the crop.
- Automatically Adjust Colors (Shift-U).
- Sharpen (Shift-S). If you are working with drawings that have lots of parallel lines, like Dore Bible Pictures, this might cause Moire effects. Sometimes you can’t use it because of that. Ctrl-Z to Undo! (and Ctrl-J to Redo).
- Color Corrections (Shift-G). In this dialog, I put the saturation all the way down (-255) if it is a grayscale picture, in order to eliminate colors. Then I adjust the contrast up, and maybe the gamma also, to try and get the background as white as possible, while keeping the black parts still black, and without compromising the finer lines; this is the tricky part. If you are doing a bunch of images from the same book, you may be able to save some time by clicking the checkbox “Save values on exit” so the same settings will autoload with the next image. If this doesn’t work well, just uncheck the box, and click “Set default values” button to get everything back to normal.
- Decrease Color Depth to 16 colors (Alt-I-D).
- Edit the Individual Colors (Alt-I-E-E). This opens the “Palette entries” dialog. Here I want to turn the light grays to fully white. So I double click any grays above about 230 (varies per picture), and replace with full white (255). On some pictures I might go even lower in the gray range to turn them to white; it just depends how much background gray is still in the pic, and how sharp and clean the lines are.
- While still in the “Palette entries” dialog, I usually change some of the lower end blacks (colors below about 40 or 50 in value) to full black (0) if it helps.
- Cleanup Stray Pixels. I use the Eraser and the Square box tool (with white foreground and background) to do further cleanup of stray pixels. You toggle this Toolbox with F12. Feel free to Zoom in for more accuracy (hold down Ctrl key and roll the mouse wheel). Holding Shift and rolling the Mouse wheel increases or decreases the size of the Eraser, or the width of the Rectangle Frame (I usually set the Rectangle Frame to 1px for better accuracy).
- When it is finished, I save as PNG.
If I need to do some clone brush work to repaint a damaged area I will then load the pic into Gimp and do it there, as Irfanview clone tool does not support feathering or anti-alias. I also use Gimp to make a skewed picture rectangular again.