To be successful in using photographic materials in Navy imaging facilities, you must establish a high standard of quality. This quality standard should be aimed at producing negatives, transparencies, and prints to please the most demanding and critical customer. This standard must be flexible enough to allow for improvement, whenever possible. However, it must resist a compromise of poor quality. Once that high-quality standard is established, you can maintain it through an exacting and practical method of quality assurance.

Quality assurance (QA) in photography has one purpose-to ensure that photographic production is consistently of high quality, whether it be a negative, print, transparency, or other form. The quality of these products is determined by three factors, each having a number of variables. These factors are human, chemical, and mechanical. The human factors include the personnel involved in photography, photographic development and/or printing, as well as those photographers who work directly in the quality assurance section of an imaging facility. Chemical factors include all chemicals and solutions used to process and print negatives, positives (viewing and intermediate), duplicate negatives, and prints. Mechanical factors include all equipment used to develop and/or print film and subsequent reproductions.

Quality assurance can be either subjective or objective. A subjective quality assurance program may simply be a set of standard high-quality negatives, prints, or transparencies with which production results are compared visually. Although this is not a very reliable system, it works well aboard a small ship or at a small shore facility where a low volume of production is performed daily. A subjective quality assurance program certainly is better than no program, but it cannot take the place of an objective program. The visual-comparison method is very subjective and has limited accuracy.

Quality assurance may be applied to either a portion of the photographic system or the entire system. In quality assurance there are three basic steps:

The quality standards for the process are specified

The process is evaluated to ensure the standards of quality are being maintained. The causes of poor or substandard quality are identified and eliminated from the photographic procedures.

Detailed quality assurance applied to the photographic process assures the photographer a better product when potential problems are detected early. If a defective camera is allowing light to fog film, the defect should be discovered after the negative is processed (if not sooner). Certainly, it is a waste of time and material to make prints from such negatives if the photograph must be reshot. In this chapter, several quality assurance procedures that can improve the product are discussed.

Chemical and sensitometric methods are used to ensure standards of quality are being sustained. The production of high-quality photographic products requires control over all factors that affect film or paper. Film exposure and processing are the two most important factors. Negatives or transparencies that are not exposed correctly and processed uniformly may have density differences (contrast) that are not within acceptable limits. Such negatives or transparencies cannot be printed successfully. Correct exposure and film processing have a direct and positive bearing on both prints and projected image quality. Goodquality negatives and transparencies also help cut operating costs by reducing waste due to retakes or reprints.

Manufacturers of films, chemicals, and papers recommend specific film exposure, chemical mixing, replenishment, processing times, temperatures, agitation techniques, wash rates, and printing and drying requirements. To be sure that such recommendations are followed in your imaging facility, you should systematically monitor the photographic process.

Any monitoring system for the photographic process requires that a reference or standard be established. By systematically comparing daily production to the reference, you can detect, identify, and correct errors in procedure.

Any photographic quality assurance system should be built around the science of sensitometry. In its broadest terms, sensitometry, as applied to the whole photographic process, includes methods of measurement, process control, and data analysis. It deals with all areas of the photographic process, from exposing film to viewing the final image.