Getting it Wright

Restoration work gets done at high resolution, mostly addressing very small portions of a photgraph. There aren't many moments when the restorationist sees the effect of the labor on the whole image. So it's wonderful to finally sit back, be the first to view the end result, and pour a cup of coffee. This is arguably the most important photograph in aviation engineering history. It's an honor to work on a version that hundreds of thousands of people will see in dozens of languages.

The full sized restoration is 14.39MB in JPEG, available here. The uncompressed file can't quite go up in its full glory because it is over 100MB. There may be another editor who can improve on this work. So until WMF software catches up with what we're doing in this area, people who understand restoration are welcome to contact me for a Skype transfer. If we can't collaborate in a wiki environment yet, we can still act collaboratively.

Congratulations to Xavexgoem

A while back I blogged about an ongoing restoration for the Ottoman surrender of Jerusalem in 1917. Good news: it's completed now and Xavexgoem has his first featured picture credit.

Here's the unanimous candidacy. It's great to see his work come to fruition. And it's a highly encyclopedic subject, well photographed, that counters systemic bias. Wikipedia could use more good material about the Middle Eastern Theater of World War I.

Xav's busy with another restoration now. Here's looking forward to praising his next success soon. Three cheers for a job well done.

Devious histograms

Jake Wartenberg is working on a wonderful chromolithograph of the Montana state capitol that's nearly done. He sent me a copy for review with a couple of challenges he was facing. And he was also generous enough to let me blog about it. So today we'll discuss more about histograms.

Changing the levels is just about the last step in restoration. It can be very useful to preview a levels adjustment in order to detect subtle problems that need to be addressed, but to do the actual fixes it's important to step back to a pre-levels version. It's a good practice to always save a version from immediately before the levels adjustment, and to keep that pre-levels version under a separate filename. Jake's got good habits and he's making more changes to his pre-levels version right now.

This is very good work and it's nearly complete. The bottom border needs cropping and an information tag that someone pasted into the lower margin needs to be clone stamped out. The data on that tag is useful--it ought to be transcribed for the image hosting page when the work gets uploaded--but it isn't part of the original work. Since histograms are dumb, that tag translates into bum data as far as the histogram is concerned. In turn, that has an effect on what the software wants to do with brightness and color adjustments throughout the image.

Another element to remember with older paper prints is that paper often acquires uneven brightness as it ages. Edges tend to dry out and darken more than the center of the paper. Notice how in this example it's the corners that are darkest of all, while some of the margin in the middle (top and bottom) is closer to white. So Jake's also going over his pre-levels image to create feathered adjustment layers that will even out the brightness and color balance.

While we were discussing this he asked me why that matters. How much difference does it make, really? Here's a demonstration from one of last year's restorations where the difference stands out.

Here's the unrestored version of a Robert Fulton submarine design from 1806.

And here's the final featured version. It took quite a bit of work to get to this point. The hardest part to fix was Fulton's description, because he had rubbed out the original description and written a second one in smaller lettering in its place. In order to get an even tone through that section I actually went in at 700% resolution, working with tool settings 2 and 3 pixels wide along the outside edges of each pen stroke. It took a lot of work, but the end result is a natural paper tone.

The original rubbed-out lettering is easier to see on a preview of the unrestored version.

But obviously, trying to work from this version isn't going to yield the best end results.

Histogram previews can be a wonderful way to glimpse the potential of an unrestored image. A histogram preview gives a hint of how far the restoration might go, and reveals challenges that might be difficult to detect otherwise. But whenever possible, do the other restoration work before a final histogram fix. The end result comes out better that way.

Serendipity

The request for help on the Tel Aviv construction site has turned up a few nibbles and one wonderful bite. What you're looking at is a new restoration of Dizengoff Square, available in full resolution here. Thanks go to Ynhockey for the assistance.

A key element of restoring historic photography for encyclopedic purposes is the ability to recognize the significance and historic nature of a scene. I've never been to Israel and fortunately for Wikipedia, Israel's copyright law is relatively generous. So the request for input on the Tel Aviv construction site prompted him to contact me. He didn't have an answer on the original question, but we went through the Library of Congress archives together and he identified an important location at the heart of Tel Aviv that has undergone significant changes since the photograph was taken 65 years ago. Without his help I wouldn't have understood its significance since I've never been to Israel.

So now, if all goes well, Wikipedia might gain its first featured picture about Israeli history. That's important both for encyclopedic purposes and for balance. Last year, working with several Palestinian editors, I helped raise the article about Palestinian costumes to good article status and restored a few photographs about Palestinian culture. In collaboration with another Israeli editor, Jaakobou, I had helped a few new articles about Israeli culture reach Wikipedia's main page at the 'Did you know?' section, but hadn't contributed to any featured content about Israel yet. With the current situation it's important to be evenhanded.

Shalom.
Salaam.
Peace.

Levels of challenge

It's always a pleasure to see people react with delight when they first encounter a restored image of their own culture. Yet it's rare to find a feature-worthy image of my own local area. Although San Diego is the oldest city in California, it was far from the gold rush. So the Library of Congress collection has far more historic images of San Francisco and not much quality material about the southern end of the state. Yet last night a high resolution photochrom turned up of our most famous local landmarks: the Hotel del Coronado. Ooh, this was exciting.

The bibliographic notes described this as a color slide. Well, that's right and it's wrong. The image itself is a photochrom c. 1900. Photochrom is a hybrid between black and white photography and chromolithography. Basically, before real color films were invented this was a type of colorization, nineteenth century style. Several decades later the damaged print was photographed for archival purposes on Kodak slide film. So although this is a color slide in one sense, in another sense it isn't.

When reviewing an archival image it's good to know what type of image it is, and also very important to assess the challenges to restoration. This one had two levels of challenge. One was more obvious than the other.

This is easy to spot in the original: the original panorama was photographed in two parts, then later the print got creased from careless folding. So up and down through the center of this image there are two white lines: one straight, one jagged. The image on the right doesn't quite match up with the one on the left either: a few pixels are missing. So it's necessary to go up and down patching in missing data. That's easy to do on the sky at top and the lawn at bottom, but to fill in the architectural details takes work. The more boundaries of any sort that a crease or a seam or a scratch crosses, the harder it will be to repair. This one crosses many boundaries in an important part of the image.

Basically what I do is first move the right portion into proper alignment, then take the healing brush and clone stamp to fill in data from surrounding material. A way to repair a damaged window on the print is to borrow data from a similar window; to fill in a missing portion of the eave, borrow from another part of the same eave. Then blend in so the stretch looks natural. By starting with the easiest parts and moving in to the complex areas, eventually the entire seam disappears.

It's not exactly easy, except in a relative sense. There's a tougher problem on this image that's less apparent at first glance.

Here's a demonstration of the problem. It's the sky. The trouble is easier to recognize after a preview selection and auto levels on the unrestored version. We don't do the restoration work on a levels preview, of course. It's just a good way to see whether something subtle would become a bigger problem than it seemed at first glance.

The natural first step in restoring the sky is to remove dirt and other marks. That's normal for any historic restoration. This is an unusual sky, though, and it has three additional problems.

1. Extreme brightness differences from the center to the left and right edges.
2. Uneven color: the left side has retained some cyan, but the right looks more magenta.
3. Excessive contrast at the bright center.
   

It's normal for paper to dry out and darken at the edges. That makes sense if we remember that even though the digitization comes from a color slide, that slide must have been a photograph of an older print. If the original were shot and printed around 1900, then it would have waited four decades or more before technology developed to create the archival slide copy. So we have an explanation for the edge fade. The solution is relatively simple: patch and blend.

The bright area at center is harder to correct, though. And so is the uneven color loss and uneven contrast. Without getting too much into details, the solution involved a series of adjustment layers. The end result isn't quite natural blue sky, but then photochrom isn't a natural color process. It's colorization. So a slightly artificial appearance is expected.

The important thing about this restoration is to recognize that there can be multiple challenges: obvious problems sometimes distract from non-obvious ones. It could be discouraging to a novice restorationist to finish the seam at the center and then get mired in the tougher challenges of the sky. If you're starting out at this sort of thing, get to know a few people who already do it. It's better to start off on material that's really within your skill set or to get a helping hand with the tough parts, than to put days into an image for sentimental reasons and then push it aside because you've gotten stuck.

Context

Is it just a damaged old stereogram of a construction site? If you know someone who lives in Tel Aviv, please show them this photograph and ask whether they can identify the location. Because if this is part of the White City then what you're looking at is a World Heritage Site being built.

According to the Library of Congress bibliographic notes, this image was published in 1936 but possibly taken during the 1920s. They have a few others also. If it's possible to get confirmation of an exact location on any of these (preferably with a photograph of the site as it appears today), then there may be enough historic value to justify a featured picture and a day for the restored version of one of these images on Wikipedia's main page. Without that information, though, these are just construction sites.

Context makes all the difference.

Banding together

About time we got back to that Benjamin Harrison portrait, isn't it? Here's the version selected by Awadewit and the IP editor. There's a lot to be said about it. First esthetics, then technicals.

Let's be frank: General Harrison here is a weak imitation of Jacques-Louis David's famous portrait of Napoleon crossing the Alps. It doesn't make sense why the Union flag is in tatters while the soldiers' uniforms are all spotless. Ben himself looks at no one in particular and raises his arm with about as much enthusiasm as he'd use to hail a waiter for a refill of coffee. It's technically a fine piece of work, but full of late Victorian conceits and the only hint of psychological depth is the horse who knows it's in a second rate piece of artwork and is ready to collapse of embarrassment.

Yeah, it's not to my taste. "But it's representative of the period," Awadewit countered. She has a point: it is that. Down to business then.

If you haven't already heard of a histogram, now's a wonderful time for an introduction. It's an almost magical little tool that's great to preview at the very beginning of a restoration and then use in earnest at the end of one.

Basically it takes all the pixels on an image and reports on their brightness, from 0 for absolute black to 255 for pure white. It produces a graph that shows the distribution of data, which is very useful. Even more useful: it lets you manipulate the information. There's a complicated Wikipedia article about it if you like equations, but actually it's quite simple and intuitive.

When images fade, what happens is they lose data on the extreme ends of the scale. The whitest white isn't pure white anymore and the darkest black becomes a shade of gray. But the overall distribution of data keeps a similar shape. So with a histogram you can move the zero point up to the lowest number where you've got actual data, then move the 255 point down to the highest number where you've got actual data. You can also shift the midpoint around if you feel like doing that.

It's a very good idea to preview a quick histogram fix at the beginning of a restoration. That's done through the 'levels' option, or 'auto levels' where the software does its best to guess what a histogram adjustment ought to be. This gives a glimpse of any subtle problems that might arise later.

First of all, remember that histograms are dumb. A histogram can't tell the difference between the tear at the upper left edge of this page and coloration that's actually supposed to be there. It doesn't understand scratches, dirt, or stains. As a restorationist you have to take care of those things yourself. And since dud data affects averages, you really need to un-preview the material to do the actual work of restoration. The ultimate results come out much cleaner that way.

Here, though, the issue is banding. You'll see several vertical lines that have nothing to do with artistic intent. Possibly that could be a result of the document having been rolled into a tube for storage.

Here's a closer look at one of those bands. It shoots upward from between the horse's ears.

Banding is not an easy problem to fix. If you aren't experienced or are easily discouraged, it's better to pass up an image with serious banding problems and look for something simpler. Otherwise the problems with this image are minor; I cleared out the rest in an hour and a half. First fix the dust, then the tear. Banding goes late in the game, because depending on what's being done the best solution is often to use the healing brush at a large pixel selection and break up those lines so they aren't visible anymore.

Key lesson here: always save a working copy immediately before changing the histogram. That's why most of my restoration filenames end in the number 2 or the letter B: the number 1 version is the pre-histogram save. If more changes turn out to be necessary, that's the source to go to for further work.


And that, at present, is where this restoration is. I had passed it to a friend who has good luck with lithography, but it fell to the bottom of his workpile so I took it back the other day. Worked on it quite a bit last night, but after histogram adjustment remaining banding issues appeared on the horse's body and the grassy field. It's going to take a bit more work yet to get General Harrison ready. Here's the not-quite-ready number 2 version. I'll save over that when final restoration is really complete.

A point worth remembering: at 114.6MB the number 1 restoration can't be uploaded to any Wikimedia Foundation website. If someone gets the urge to try their hand at an improvement they have to contact me. And if I get hit by a bus, so does this work.

Discoveries and tough decisions

Sometimes the most important things are tucked away in archival corners. This is the aftermath at Wounded Knee. The bibliographic notes say "U.S. soldiers amid scattered debris of camp", but I wondered at the size of those piles. Why had the tipi sides been taken down, but blankets left on the snow? Regardless of what was there, this is an important historic scene and a high resolution file. So I downloaded and started work on it.

Most of the images in this post come from the current partial restoration. Here's one from the original file that demonstrates the usual challenge of cleaning out creases and dirt: a small sample of the sky. This is in pretty good shape for photography over 100 years old; everything collects a few problems over time. Sky is usually a good thing to start on; deciphering sky is relatively easy. Worked down from there, saw a tin cup or two in the snow. Then something else.

A shoe. Two shoes. They looked like they were still being worn. The way to find out is to scroll to the right and slightly downward.

A hand. Then a face. There were at least three bodies in the foreground, all partially covered with blankets. Probably four. More piles farther off, the right size and shape.

It's the sort of scene that makes one stop and think. Is it respectful to work on this? Someone someday will probably take this the wrong way, but this is history. It happened. It's important to document these things. So after hard thought I decided to continue the restoration.

It's quite a responsibility. And it makes the choices harder.

Knowing a fair amount about image restoration doesn't make a person an expert in forensics. Very near the bodies there's an unusual spot pattern that seems to follow the contours of the snow. Is that photographic degradation or is it blood? I'm going to make my best guesses with this image, but frankly they're guesses. If some of it comes out wrong there ought to be an effective way of correcting the mistakes. This is one of the days when I wish the Wikimedia Foundation had more restorationists--someone to turn to with greater expertise. So here's one argument for a separate restoration wiki. Someday we may get a forensics expert on board, and when that day comes it'll be very useful to have an archive of interim saves.

Dude

One of the best things about archival searching is discovering something new and unexpected. Last night I was looking for material with an unusual aspect ratio to test out a new template for vertical image scrolling. Ideally it would also be suitable for restoration. Unfortunately most of the material that had the right dimensions wasn't in good enough condition. I had already spent several hours on something that ultimately wasn't very satisfactory. The background had banding issues and the attempt at restoration just didn't yield a satisfactory result. Then came a pleasant discovery.

Thumbnail previews can be deceptive. So when this joined the queue of several downloads, it didn't seem worth the trouble to take notes. Just kept on surfing through Japanese prints. When the file finally opened 240 megabytes later it was breathtaking. Imagine a long slow California exclamation of "Duuude!" Had to save immediately, couldn't remember the real title, so it's Dude.tif on my system. Click the thumbnail for a slightly better view.

Turns out this is Zhong Kui, a vanquisher of demons in Taoist mythology. He's known as Shōki in Japan. This late eighteenth century depiction should be restored and ready for upload soon.

Cream of the crop

Rotation and cropping are the first, simplest and most important decisions in many restorations. Unrestored images could be interpreted more than one way, and cropping is a powerful method of selecting one interpretation at the expense of others.

Take the caricature of Charles Darwin: is the illustration itself the only thing that matters? Or is the date and publication in Vanity Fair important enough to retain? And if context is important, how much context do we keep? A crop that includes the border text needs balance. And that can be tough to attain from material this old: With many originals from the nineteenth century or earlier, either the paper has dried and warped with age or the borders were never drawn perfectly to begin with. Twenty-first century tastes are accustomed to digitally perfect parallels and can object to variances as small as a few hundredths of a degree.

Here's one where that problem is easy to spot. The borders on this political cartoon of Lincoln and Johnson are off by tenths of a degree, not hundredths. So the bottom border tilts upward from left to right while the vertical borders are reasonably vertical already. One gets an urge to rotate the thing, but every rotation comes out wrong because the border itself isn't rectangular.

There are three potential potential solutions here:

• Crop the border out of the picture and lose the caption.
  
• Manipulate individual lines of border to create an actual rectangle.
  
• Leave the caption in and the border lines unchanged.

Any of those choices are arguably correct, depending on how one regards the image.  The easiest one to refute is the first option.  This caption may be obscure after a century and a half, but to me it looks like an explanation of the original artist's choice to juxtapose the president in coat and tails against a reference to his humble origins.  Of all the people who became United States presidents, Lincoln started out life lower on the socioeconomic ladder than any other.  Hence the references to manual labor, which seem to result in a compliment to Lincoln's hard work and perseverence bringing the country back together at the end of the Civil War.  The artist's caption helps explain that; I decided to leave it in.

So if we keep those darn borders, do we fix them?  Do we rotate individual lines and make them correct?  It can be argued that is not artistic intent, that it's distracting, and it ought to be fixed.  It can also be argued that slight variances from mechanical perfection are characteristic of the period, therefore historical, and ought to be kept.  When they performed a digital restoration on the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz they erased the wires that had lifted the flying monkeys.  I'm a Wiki Witch; I prefer vintage monkeys in their original technical imperfection even if it takes me out of the story just a little bit.

So I selected a compromise rotation and cropped a little extra space outside the border lines to minimize attention to that flaw.  The closer an uneven border comes to the edge of the digital image, the more apparent any deviation is.

Ragesoss complained about the final choice here and, to be candid, it wasn't my first crop either.  Originally I had kept the side borders and I'd left leeway outside them because they were a few hundredths of a degree off from true.  But the area outside the border on the original has uneven tone, especially the blown whites at lower left.  And although the file was big enough to work with it wasn't ideal.  I could have filled in the problem tolerably but the technical limitations of the file didn't make it worth the effort.  Overall, for an image that most viewers will see in thumbnail, a good rule is to crop in as close as feasible.  These kinds of decisions are often tradeoffs, and arguable either way.  

Shakespeare's "Howard the Duck"

If you haven't read Titus Andronicus (and Wikipedia's excellent restorationist Shoemaker's Holiday hadn't), there's not much need to regret that particular gap in an education. Even the best of them can turn out one real dud. The only analogy that came to mind was a stretch. If Shakespeare is the Steven Spielberg of the stage, then Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare's Howard the Duck.  Shortly after getting that explanation Shoemaker read the plot summary.  It wasn't the cannibalism that bothered Shoe quite so much as...eh, well...find out for yourself if you dare.

Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom has claimed that the play cannot be taken seriously and that the best imaginable production would be one directed by Mel Brooks.

Shoemaker, though, was interested in a detail. And that detail is worth attention as an example of digital image management.

The article has a larger version of the illustration above. Obviously the illustration reflects a high technical standard of workmanship and it looks like the book was a good reproduction. A little staining at the bottom border is a minor concern. This ought to be good material for restoration, but it isn't. The hosting page data is the giveaway: (2,080 × 2,789 pixels, file size: 1.34 MB, MIME type: image/jpeg). That's large enough dimensions for featured picture consideration even after rotation and cropping, but at only 1.34 megabytes the data is much too compressed. I've cropped and blown it up a bit to illustrate the problem.

There's just not much to be done with this. The file is too artifacted. Shoemaker checked out the source archive in hopes their original would be better and it wasn't. Which is a shame because this could have been so much better. Lesson for the day: use a lossless format and don't compress files if they're intended for a serious purpose. I wish Wikimedia Foundation software accepted .tif format. Library of Congress does. But the University of Pennsylvania doesn't. And because of JPEG compression and artifacting, their hosting of Titus Andronicus is a dead end.

Darwin Day

The other day Ragesoss showed up at my user talk with a reminder that Darwin Day happens next month: the two hundredth anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. Could we have a featured picture for the occasion?

I'm a sucker for that kind of request.

When it comes to online image archives for that kind of purpose, the Library of Congress website has everybody else beat hands down. Site architecture is chaotic, things can be hit or miss, but when they get it right they really get it right in a way nobody else does. Because what's needed for this kind of endeavor is a hefty TIFF file made from a well-curated original on a really good clean scanner.

A lot of people who don't do restoration come along with an 80K file and expect something to be accomplished with it. Sorry: I can't restore information that isn't there. 2MB is about the minimum, and that's pushing it. 10MB is more like it. I don't call a file large until it's at least 100MB, and one of the images in my current workpile is over half a gigabyte.

The Library of Congress knows how to create and host this sort of material. Also wonderful: they don't try to claim proprietary control over information that's in the public domain (a surprising number of museums and archives do assert such claims, but that's a story for a different day). So after trotting over to the photographs collection and running a search, a serviceable rotograph turns up at a decent 23MB. Here's the page. Not the most famous likeness, but the technical quality is far better than is likely available anywhere else.

Five or so hours later the restoration was complete. Practice makes this sort of work go quickly. The full sized restoration is a nearly 5MB JPEG file (Wikimedia software doesn't allow for TIFF uploads) and available here. It's enjoyable to be able to help out in an event as important as Darwin Day.

Yet it's a shame that for such an iconic figure of British science, the best source for a portrait is a foreign archive. Surely British archives have better quality original images. This is their heritage, their history. I wish more countries brought their collections into the digital age the way the Library of Congress has been doing.

A work in progress

One of the goals of the media restoration project is to help coach more people who want to learn restorations. There are more valuable photographs that deserve restoration than I could ever do alone and it's just common sense to share skills and develop best practices. We've got other people who work with sounds, etchings, and video.

So today's post is an excerpt from a session with one of the editors who's getting started. He's restoring a much higher resolution version of the file at right: the Turkish surrender of Jerusalem to the British in 1917. Tonight we were troubleshooting. The most challenging issue to restoration on this photograph is addressing a band of discoloration that runs across the flag. Now this isn't the only issue that needs to be addressed but it's a critical one: after all, this is the white flag in a surrender photograph.

So we were both in Skype. He was using voice and I was replying in text. At one point I sent him a detail image to convey some ideas. It would have been nearly impossible or at least drastically less efficient to have conducted the conversation entirely on wiki. He's consented to posting my end of the conversation here. It's a typical example of media content collaboration.

[10:03:53 PM] Durova says: remind me the filename?
[10:04:10 PM] Durova says: nm
[10:04:11 PM] Durova says: got it
[10:04:20 PM] Durova says: library of congress
[10:04:28 PM] Durova says: Jerusalem surrender.tif
[10:05:07 PM] Durova says: do you mean the band that intersects with the flag?
[10:05:32 PM] Durova says: right
[10:05:49 PM] Durova says: but doing stuff that crosses color boundaries isn't easy.
[10:05:57 PM] Durova says: and it's two different tones.
[10:06:13 PM] Durova says: not likely
[10:06:21 PM] Durova says: I think it's a type of decomposition
[10:06:25 PM] Durova says: sec while I look in
[10:06:36 PM] Durova says: previewing at low resolution now
[10:06:43 PM] Durova says: my guess is that the bottom tone is correct
[10:06:46 PM] Durova says: let me look closer though
[10:07:12 PM] Durova says: right
[10:07:19 PM] Durova says: oh, definitely the bottom half is correct.
[10:07:22 PM] Durova says: I have a guess here.
[10:07:30 PM] Durova says: this was scanned from a paper print
[10:07:35 PM] Durova says: I'll bet that's a crease
[10:07:48 PM] Durova says: and the difference in tone was that this section didn't lie flat on the scanner bed
[10:08:13 PM] Durova says: so the light wasn't hitting it quite straight on
[10:08:22 PM] Durova says: and one side reflected more onto the machine
[10:08:37 PM] Durova says: Well
[10:08:46 PM] Durova says: other than the section right on the flag itself
[10:08:56 PM] Durova says: most of that is fairly compatible with the natural cloud patterns
[10:09:08 PM] Durova says: the big challenge is to get the flag straightened out
[10:09:09 PM] Durova says: chance
[10:09:30 PM] Durova says: now there are actually two sections you need to think about
[10:09:36 PM] Durova says: two creases on that flag
[10:09:43 PM] Durova says: one is up near the upper left
[10:09:46 PM] Durova says: see that smaller one?
[10:09:57 PM] Durova says: hm?
[10:10:02 PM] Durova says: but do you see what I'm talking about?
[10:10:22 PM] Durova says: ok
[10:10:44 PM] Durova says: If you don't see it, I could cut out a detail and circle it for you
[10:10:47 PM] Durova says: then send you the file
[10:10:53 PM] Durova says: ok you got it
[10:11:28 PM] Durova says: now here's the solution
[10:11:29 PM] Durova says: yes
[10:11:38 PM] Durova says: thye bottom half of that flag is correct
[10:11:45 PM] Durova says: it's the top half that has issues
[10:11:52 PM] Durova says: and it basically has issues in two sections
[10:12:00 PM] Durova says: a short band above the big crease
[10:12:08 PM] Durova says: and a smaller area near the small crease
[10:12:16 PM] Durova says: so let's start with the easy stuff
[10:12:22 PM] Durova says: try the healing brush on the small crease
[10:12:34 PM] Durova says: sampling from the large stable area at the bottom 20% of the flag.
[10:12:56 PM] Durova says: A basic approach that works with a lot of these things is to take on the small problems first
[10:13:07 PM] Durova says: then once the simple stuff is solved, the bigger problems are easier.
[10:13:29 PM] Durova says: Let me know when you've got that area fixed
[10:13:39 PM] Durova says: now the second step is the right border of that flag
[10:13:46 PM] Durova says: you'll want to go in at high resolution
[10:13:52 PM] Durova says: I'd use the clone stamp
[10:14:05 PM] Durova says: not at full hardness though
[10:14:07 PM] Durova says: about 70%
[10:14:26 PM] Durova says: and I'd sample that area just beneath the crease
[10:14:30 PM] Durova says: that's a healthy area
[10:14:37 PM] Durova says: and carefully stamp it
[10:14:51 PM] Durova says: want me to draw it up for you
[10:14:57 PM] Durova says: you see that sharpish white line?
[10:15:02 PM] Durova says: that's the crease itself
[10:15:11 PM] Durova says: okay, yes
[10:15:15 PM] Durova says: ah you're still on the first one
[10:15:21 PM] Durova says: right
[10:15:23 PM] Durova says: okay
[10:15:29 PM] Durova says: well you see how at the bottom of that band
[10:15:34 PM] Durova says: there's a sharp white line?
[10:15:40 PM] Durova says: that's the crease
[10:15:47 PM] Durova says: it isn't straight
[10:15:54 PM] Durova says: but that's the point where the light hits it differently
[10:16:07 PM] Durova says: so everything beneath that is basically healthy
[10:16:26 PM] Durova says: okay so I'd fix that border with either the clone stamp or a mask.
[10:16:33 PM] Durova says: Your choice. I'm partial to clone stamping.
[10:16:50 PM] Durova says: Healing brush doesn't work very well for the border though.
[10:17:02 PM] Durova says: yes it's a fuzzy border
[10:17:23 PM] Durova says: but you'd likely lose even more detail by attempting to healing brush there
[10:17:39 PM] Durova says: basically there are three sections that need either clone stamping or masks
[10:17:47 PM] Durova says: the easiest one is at far right
[10:17:55 PM] Durova says: yes
[10:18:01 PM] Durova says: I'll tell you the others once you get there.
[10:18:09 PM] Durova says: or I could draw this up and send you a detail image.
[10:18:15 PM] Durova says: know what?
[10:18:17 PM] Durova says: I'll do that
[10:18:18 PM] Durova says: ok
[10:18:34 PM] Durova says: a picture's worth a thousand words.
[10:18:40 PM] Durova says: I'll just be a moment.
[10:26:51 PM] Durova says: sorry, need to send you the other version
[10:27:13 PM] Durova says: there; much smaller

[10:30:11 PM] Durova says: So, you have that file open?
[10:30:20 PM] Durova says: yes
[10:30:24 PM] Durova says: see what I mean?
[10:30:39 PM] Durova says: once you get those three areas the rest is easy
[10:30:50 PM] Durova says: the rest is just healing brush work, really
[10:31:05 PM] Durova says: sure thing :)
[10:31:07 PM] Durova says: ack
[10:31:10 PM] Durova says: sure
[10:31:11 PM] Durova says: of course
[10:31:15 PM] Durova says: well, I'll be here.
[10:31:26 PM] Durova says: I knew this flag would be a problem
[10:31:33 PM] Durova says: not surprised you wanted advice
[10:31:39 PM] Durova says: actually, may I mention something?
[10:31:46 PM] Durova says: I'm proud you're taking this on yourself
[10:31:57 PM] Durova says: I was kinda thinking you'd shoot this problem back to me to fix
[10:32:06 PM] Durova says: this will teach you a lot :)
[10:32:17 PM] Durova says: aw shucks

Able was eh ere he saw Elba

It can be a good thing to focus on content. This morning I needed a smile and checked my watchlist to discover that a featured picture candidate had just gotten promoted. My user talk will probably get a notice about it pretty soon.

Not the greatest artwork, really, but it's a restoration of an original 1814 hand-tinted etching and the subject is Napoleon. It's a piece of trolling: a British celebration of his exile to Elba. He rides a donkey backwards with a broken sword in his hand and a tear streaming down his eye, holding the animal's tail as a caption bursts from its rear, The greatest events in human life is turn'd to a puff.

There's a cute piece of doggerel at the bottom:

Farewell my brave soldiers, my eagles adieu;
Stung with my ambition, o'er the world ye flew:
But deeds of disaster so sad to rehearse
I have lived--fatal truth for to know the reverse.
From Moscow to Lipsic; the case it is clear
I was sent back to France with a flea in my ear.

A lesson to mortals regarding my fall:
He grasps at a shadow, by grasping at all.
My course it is finish'd my race it is run,
My career it is ended just where it begun.
The Empire of France no more it is mine.
Because I can't keep it I freely resign.

It's a timeless sentiment. Every one of your problems you created yourself. You've been a huge hassle and we're glad to see you gone. I admire Napoleon in a way: not many people with egos that huge actually carry out their plans on such scale that the trolling of their downfall remains encyclopedic two centuries afterward. It was fun to restore this and get it close to its original condition. Text-heavy etchings require a lot of labor at high resolution, but the result can be really pleasant. It brings history to life.