Photos from the most beautiful places in the world
 Millions of customers in Germany and Europe use to debate on the latest Tchibo catalogue every week. It’s appears weekly and offers by far more than just coffee, since it provides the readers with the highlights of the week that are spoken about. Frank Gerlinger just smiles to himself, since he knows every single offer weeks in advance. His company "CromaBase" handles the photos that are submitted for the catalogue from all across the world.
It was 10.000 in 2005 for the Tchibo catalogues only, to name a figure. About 3.500 came in additionally and were used for packagings. Even other advertisements and product innovations Gerlinger knows in advance. His customers are numerous ad-agencies and photographers that work for Air Berlin, the Deutsche Post, Mercedes Benz and other noted companies.
"CromaBase develops and processes online solutions for digital workflow," introduces Frank Gerlinger his company that is resident in Hamburg. Might sound complicated at first, but it’s easy indeed. Photographers from across the world provide digital images for catalogues, packagings, magazines and much more. All this incoming material needs to be archived and processed. It’s the color management that deserves special attention, since when the photos are printed everything has to be right. And this is the assignment of CromaBase. The digital photos are compiled and sent to Hamburg afterwards where the true work actually begins. But how are these images transferred to Hamburg? It is done via CromaBOX that is based on the Shuttle XPC Barebone SB75G2, a special RAID-system featuring three hard disks with 400 Gigabyte each. Such a huge amount of data requires a lot of security. "We’ve had already 10 Gigabytes per photographer and day and it usually comes to quite a lot in the end," explains Gerlinger. The images are stored on CromaBOX that edits and sends them to a central computer in Hamburg. The images nearly come from everywhere. "We have CromaBOXes in Cape Town and Miami," reports Gerlinger happily. This lets photographers transfer their works easily and fast to their clients who can access perfectly edited images instantly.
http://www.cromabase.de |