Restoration is inherently interpretive. Consider something simple: a newspaper cartoon in black and white. There are many possible whites; which do you select? Do you retain or eliminate paper grain? Older illustrations are often imperfect by a few tenths of a degree, so when the border isn't quite rectangular what rotation do you choose? Do you crop wider to compensate or do you crop out the border itself? When you detect an obvious printing error such as an uninked spot within a straight line, do you fill it in or do you retain the empty spot? If you retain that spot when it looks like a printing error, what do you do when ink rubs away from the page after printing? Or when you're not sure of the cause?
The two most prolific Wikimedians in this area are Shoemaker's Holiday and myself, and although we often work together we also have longstanding philosophical differences that reflect in our featured picture galleries. The most obvious of these regards color balance. A more interesting debate concerns nineteenth century etchings and engravings (it's interesting to us--might bore the rest of you to tears). People who rely on tools and plugins don't avoid interpretion; that only delegates the interpretive work to a computer program. There's an example from my bookshelf which, fortunately, also happens to be available via Google Books preview. Scroll to the Texas saloon on page 11. http://books.google.com/books?id=SNoNlmvJQy4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=digital+restoration&ei=-_mzSqbdNqKIkATfoamJBA#v=onepage&q=&f=false This author is very helpful in some other respects, but his reliance on plugins is a liability here. The software has made choices with the building facade which are clearly wrong: real windows don't morph into puddles. Enough of the right window remains visible to show that it is a duplicate of the left window. A better reconstruction would borrow data from the intact window. The vertical lines of the facade planks can be rebuilt in a similar way. Shadows on the facade and men's clothing gives a trustworthy measure of the sunlight's angle, direction, and intensity. That would serve as a reference for distinguishing and correcting brightness variances that result from stains. Of course if this were a Commons upload the edits would be documented in detail on the image hosting page, the unrestored file would be uploaded under a separate filename, and both file descriptions would link to each other for cross reference. -Durova On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Phil Nash <pn007a2...@blueyonder.co.uk>wrote: > I agree from this, and your previous post, that restoring historical images > can be a difficult process, particularly when the images themselves may > have > originally been pure factual journalism rather than having a polemical > purpose, although in my experience, that is more allied to the commentary > attached than the image itself. In the case you cite, processing an image > may well involve some interpretation of the depiction, and you rightly > point > out some of the pitfalls involved. Absent the intention of the > photographer, > who may not even have considered how his image may have been used (as long > as he was paid), making assumptions I believe to be unhelpful, and even > Original Research. All this convinces me that image restoration should be > limited to correcting obvious physical defects in the source, and not going > beyond that. I am not in any way criticising those who do this (after all, > I've done it with my own images, although I do know what I intended when I > created the image), bur I do believe that restoration should not blur into > interpretation.</ramble> > > -- http://durova.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l