Application of Information Technology

in Woodcut Prints

Wei Huang(B)

Fujian Putian Xiamen Academy of Arts and Design, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 361000, China
[email protected]

Abstract. The traditional woodblock printing plate has certain limitations.

Because of the lack of accuracy of manual processing, the picture effect is weak-
ened. Under the background of the diversification of modern art styles, woodblock
prints are easily impacted by other art forms. The application of information tech-
nology in woodcut printmaking by woodcut makers can make woodcut printmak-
ing more diversified, and at the same time improve the overall efficiency of design
and the creative effect. Based on this, this paper introduces the problems existing in
traditional woodcut prints, and puts forward the advantages of applying computer
technology to assist woodcut prints. It also introduces the specific application of
Photoshop software in information technology woodcut prints, and uses the pre-
training VGG19 model to complete woodcut prints, hoping to provide a reference
for the development of woodcut prints production technology.

Keywords: Information technology · Woodcut prints · Neural network ·

Photoshop · VGG19 model

1 Introduction

Woodcut print is the oldest type of print, which has the characteristics of image trans-
mission from the beginning and hides its artistic value. With the rapid development of
image technology, the function of woodcut prints as communication has been weakened.
By 180, the original print movement jointly carried out by France and Britain gradually
built woodcuts with independent artistic significance. By the early 20th century, German
expressionist woodcuts had certain characteristics. China’s woodcut prints developed in
the 1920s and became one of the most important artistic achievements in the 20th cen-
tury. With the update and popularization of information technology, it provides a lot of
convenience for the production of woodcut prints. Therefore, how to apply information
technology to woodcut prints has become a concern of many producers.

© The Author(s) 2023

Z. Zhan et al. (Eds.): EIMSS 2022, AHCS 7, pp. 691–699, 2023.
https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-024-4_72
692 W. Huang

2 Problems Existing in Traditional Woodcut Printmaking

(A) Limitations of wooden boards
The four types of templates of traditional woodcut prints, concave, convex, flat and leak-
ing, are defined according to the printing principle of prints and the physical properties
of templates. Template represents the basic attributes of the picture, but also determines
the technicality and interest of the picture. Templates and equipment restrict the techni-
cal specifications of printing production, so that the theme and form of the picture are
confined to a small scope [1]. Under this background, the author’s creativity can only be
created on the basis of meeting the template, which obviously limits the creative ability
of the creator. At the same time, because of the difference of template making principle
and raw materials used, it also has different effects on the creative ability of creators.

(B) The impact of different types of art forms

With the rapid development of network technology, visual images are expressed in
various ways, robbing people’s retina. Surrounded by electronic devices, people can
browse a large number of visual works such as different types of advertising images,
photographic works and digital images through home TV, mobile phones or computers
without leaving home. Excellent art can always show the current visual experience, and
its materials, production techniques and aesthetic concepts are related to the life of the
times. The information age has changed people’s visual experience and aesthetic meth-
ods, and the audience’s demand for visual stimulation has also increased significantly.
Traditional woodcut prints are essentially the product of the agricultural era, and we need
to rely on industrial civilization to realize the modernization transformation. In recent
decades, the pace of industrial development has continued to accelerate, and woodcut
prints have gradually developed in a convenient and practical direction, which has grad-
ually been known by people. The emergence and popularization of computer technology
will undoubtedly have a certain impact on the development of woodcut prints [2].

(C) Indirectly weaken the picture effect

The particularity of traditional woodcut prints is that the artistic language of woodcut
prints can’t be directly expressed in the picture, and the lines, shapes and colors in the
printing process show an indirect image effect. The creation of traditional woodcut prints
must be transferred and conveyed through an intermediary, that is, wooden block. This
period is the process of transferring images by using intermediary, so there are a lot of
contingencies during the production. These contingency factors may cause unexpected
picture effects, but they may also lead to significant differences between the final painting
and the author’s artistic conception.
 Application of Information Technology in Woodcut Prints 693

3 Application Advantages of Information Technology in Woodcut

Prints
(A) The diversity of expressions
Woodcut prints are generally trapped in a relatively narrow creative space, and it seems
that innovation is very difficult. But the application and popularization of information
technology have changed the present situation. By flexibly applying computer technol-
ogy, creators can try to use a single graphic design software or cross-apply different
graphic software to create, and achieve diversified expression effects. Take Photoshop
as an example, which contains different types of creative tools such as pencils and pelvic
cavity. Painter can truly reproduce the natural brush strokes; 3DMAX can make three-
dimensional modeling, and the creator only needs to add some graphic design software
to carry out post-effect and image rendering. Creators can even use scanning equip-
ment, digital cameras and other external devices to input the image data produced by
the audience or natural image data into the computer, so as to enrich the creative effect
of woodcut prints.

(B) Optimize the creative environment of woodcut prints

Traditional woodcut prints give people the impression that the creator has a carving
knife in his hand, a lot of pigments on his waistline, and the environment is filled with
all kinds of inks and chemicals. Therefore, the creative working environment gives
people the impression of congestion and boredom, while the chemicals in the air are
not conducive to human health. However, with the extensive application of information
technology, the industrial workshop-style production mode of traditional woodcut prints
has been changed, and the staff can complete the creation of prints in the studio, which
has changed the traditional working environment [3].

(C) Ensure the directness of the creative effect

The creators of traditional woodcut prints need to create according to the process of
drawing, making wooden block and printing. This process cannot be separated from
diversified printing equipment and materials, and the production process is very com-
plicated. Rubbing is close to manual labor, which is the main influencing factor of
printmakers’ creation efficiency. The core of artistic creation should be mental work,
and showing rich emotions requires the creator to have enough energy. If the production
process is too complicated, it will make the creators get involved in complicated work,
leading to the gradual lack of spirituality in artistic creation and weakening the artistic
creation ability of woodcut prints [4]. The two processes of plate making and printing
of traditional woodcut prints are relatively independent. Before printing, the creator can
only analyze the effect that may be obtained after printing according to his experience.
If information technology is used, what you do is what you see, and the error between
plate making and printing can be reduced as much as possible, which is of positive
significance for improving the design effect. In addition, the computer technology has
excellent function of engraving and cloud backup of engraving content, which enables
creators to modify woodcut prints at any time and any place, avoiding the waste of
woodcut prints and improving the creation accuracy of woodcut prints.
694 W. Huang

Fig. 1. Image file

Fig. 2. Processed image

4 Specific Application Ways of Information Technology in Woodcut

Prints

(A) The application of Photoshop in woodcut prints

Creators can use the filter function in Photoshop software to simulate many painting
effects on different materials in a reasonable way, and woodcut prints are one of them.
Through this software, it can provide convenience for woodcut print design and improve
the efficiency of woodcut print design. It can be implemented by tools such as Find
Edges filter, Grayscale command, Texturizer filter and Level adjustment. The specific
methods are as follows:
First, the processing of image files. Open the image file (as shown in Fig. 1). Select
the Filter|Stylize|Find Edges filter in the menu, and modify the search edge of the image.
The image effect obtained is shown in Fig. 2. As far as this image file is concerned, the
color of the original image is very rich, while the target image, that is, the key image of
woodcut prints, is a depiction effect and cannot contain such rich materials. Therefore,
it is only necessary to deal with texture and brightness, so it is necessary to convert the
original image into a grayscale image for processing.
Secondly, the creator selects the Image|Mode|Grayscale command to convert the
picture into a gray image. During the conversion of grayscale images, the system will
automatically generate a confirmation dialog box asking whether to reject color infor-
mation. That is, to confirm whether to discard the color information, it is recommended
to choose discard.
Thirdly, adjust the color ring of the gray image to make it more suitable for the
effect of woodcut prints. It is suggested to choose Image|Adjustments|Level, open the
editing dialog box for adjusting the color levels, design the Input Levels to be 0, 1 and
220, and confirm to save. Then, select the File|Open command, select an image made
of wood grain, finally select Filter|Texture|Teturicer, and bring up the Texturizer filter
 Application of Information Technology in Woodcut Prints 695

editing dialog box, in which the list on the right side Load Texture selects the processed
file, and sets the Scaling value to 100%. After confirmation, you can get the final effect
image depicted by the woodblock.

(B) Neural network image style transformation

Neural network image style transformation, if the high-order features extracted by the
image recognition system are closer in European distance, the two images are similar
in content. This is because the accepted and trained image recognition system’s high-
order features coordinate with the semantic information in the images, and the style
of artistic works is regarded as visual texture, which has low-order spatial statistical
features. For example, the timely image is the low-order features extracted by the system
and has the same spatial statistics. Then the two images are similar in style, and the
difference in style between the two images can also be judged by using Euclidean
distance. Pre-trained VGG19 model is mostly used as feature extraction equipment,
and relevant feature representations extracted by higher layers of CNN are regarded as
content representations, and the correlation of output feature maps among all channels of
convolution layer is regarded as style representations [5]. The overall process of woodcut
style transformation is shown in Fig. 3.
Generate a graph initialization image g and a content image p, which will be re-
encoded in all layers of VGG19 model. The total convolution kernel of the 1st layer
is Nl , and the specification of the feature graph is set to Ml , which is the product of
the width and height of the 1st layer feature graph. The L-layer feature map is saved
as the matrix Fl ∈ Nl * Nl , and the relevant feature representation of the image in the
L-layer is obtained. Fijl represents the activation of the image at the j position on the ith
convolution kernel in the 1st-layer. The relative high-level features are expressed as the
content representation of the image, and Fl and Pl represent the content representation
of the initialization image g and the content image p in the first layer, respectively, so
that the defined content loss function can be obtained as follows:
1 l
Lc(p, g, l) = (F − Fijl )2
2 ij
The derivative of this function to the 1sr layer activation item is:

∂Lc (F l − P l ), if Fijl > 0
=
∂Fijl 0, if Fijl < 0

The style image style of woodcut prints is characterized to determine the correlation
among all channel feature maps in the same convolution layer of VGG19 model. Gram
matrix is used to calculate the correlation of each feature map of all convolution layers in
the network as the style representation, Gram matrix Gl ∈ Nl * Nl , where Nl represents
the total amount of convolution kernels in the 1st layer, and Gijl represents the product of
the ith convolution kernel feature map and the jth convolution kernel feature map after
the image is subjected to the 1st vectorization. The specific formula is as follows:

Gijl = Fikl Fjk
l

i,j
696 W. Huang

Content Style
image image

CRF-RNN semanc Labelme semanc

segmentaon segmentaon

Semanc segmentaon Semanc segmentaon

graph graph

Binarized treatment Binarized treatment

Content map mask Style map mask

Style transformaon network with spaal

guide channel

the graph

Fig. 3. Overall flow chart of woodcut style conversion algorithm

The initialization image g of the generated graph is defined, and the woodcut style
image is set as a. G and A respectively represent the style representation of the generated
image and woodcut style image in the ith layer of the network [6]. The mean square
error is used to determine the style difference between the living layer picture and the
woodcut print style image. In this way, you can define the loss function of the ith layer
woodcut style, as follows:
1 
El = (Gijl − Alij )2
4Nl2 Ml2 i,j
 Application of Information Technology in Woodcut Prints 697

Fig. 4. The effect of regional style transformation of woodcut prints

Wl indicates that all convolution layers of the network activate the corresponding
weight factors, and the derivative formula of this formula function with respect to the
response value of the I-th layer number is as follows:
⎧ 
∂Lc ⎨ 1 F l T G l − Al , if F l > 0
2 2 ij
= Nl Ml
∂Fijl ⎩ 0, if F l < 0ij

In the above formula, Lc represents the loss function between the content image and
the generated image, and Ls represents the loss function between the woodcut image
and the generated image. α and β respectively represent the content loss function and the
style of woodcut prints, and the weight of the loss function can effectively control the
stylization level of woodcut prints by using α and β. Through the style transformation, the
creator can directly transform the image materials into woodcut prints, and directly make
the prints [7]. In this way, the time required for image design is greatly reduced, and the
final effect of the pictures is significantly improved, which is of positive significance for
promoting the development of woodcut prints. The effect of regional style transformation
of woodcut prints is shown in Fig. 4.
From the point of view of image space control, there will be some problems such
as inconspicuous woodcut notch texture and chaotic distribution in the living layer map
with neural style conversion algorithms such as Gatys, which will destroy the semantic
information to some extent. The reason is that Gram matrix can only refine the global
average characteristics of the image, and lacks the restriction on the spatial information
of objects. Therefore, this paper uses the mask image as a guide and adds a space guide
channel to solve the above problems. Firstly, the spatial guide feature map is generated
to complete the image segmentation and transformation. Combining the network mask
image to form a space guide channel Tlr on all convolution layer channels, where Tlr
represents the R space guide channel on the L layer in the network, and multiplying
Tlr and the vectorized feature map by corresponding elements to obtain a space guide
feature map:

Flr (x) = Tlr Fl (x)

698 W. Huang

where Flr (x) represents the ith column vector. Save the spatial guidance feature map
as a two-dimensional matrix Flr to obtain the spatial guidance feature representation,
and define the spatial guidance content loss function on the spatial guidance feature
representation as follows:
1  l
Lcss(p, g, l) = (Fr (g) − Grl (a))2ij
2
r=1 i,j

Similarly, in the aspect of space guiding characteristics, the guiding Gram matrix is
defined, and all guiding matrices are used as spaces to guide the optimization goal of
the channel area. The style loss of each floor is as follows:
1 
Els = 2 2
(Grl (g) − Grl (a))2ij
4Nl Ml r=1 i,j

By using the control of the space guide channel, the image optimization is carried
out in the corresponding space guide channel area, ensuring that the pattern is only
transmitted in this area, so as to avoid the chaotic distribution of the notch texture
characteristics of the image [8].

5 Conclusion
As an art form, woodcut prints are sensitive and avant-garde. Creators should accept
new ideas as soon as possible, and reasonably introduce the advanced technology of
information technology, so that woodcut printmaking, a traditional art form, can be inte-
grated with advanced information technology. Although information technology cannot
completely replace woodcut prints, it does provide help and new development courses
for the design of woodcut prints, and promotes the production efficiency and quality of
woodcut prints. The organic integration of woodcut prints and information technology
has also attracted the attention of many scholars.

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 Application of Information Technology in Woodcut Prints 699

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