This is part of a collection of Chinese Manuscripts that belongs to Hebrew Union College (Cincinnati, OH).  This manuscript, Ms 31, as well as Ms 4 and Ms 5, came to the Preservation Lab for third party treatment.  Upon examination our conservator, Ashleigh Scheiszer, noticed that while all three of these manuscripts from HUC were bound in brown Western style cases, Manuscript 31 is the only one of the three that retains its original silk cover (upper and lower) in the binding.  RTI was carried out to explore and highlight the detail of the upper silk cover.

The video begins with the Default mode to explore the normal and raking illumination of the cover.  Then the Specular Enhancement mode helps to highlight the floral decoration on the silk.  When we zoom in and switch from the Specular Enhancement mode to the Default mode and then back to the SE mode and finally the Normals Visualization mode, you can see how this beautiful decoration could go unnoticed.

We then switch to the PTM module to explore the Luminance Unsharp Masking mode which further highlights the detail of the floral decoration and the texture of the silk itself.

This RTI capture session was performed by Catarina Figueirinhas and Jessica Ebert .