Goals

Awadewit is among the Wikipedians I most admire: a prolific contributor of high quality articles on scholarly topics, and a joy to work with.  She's completing her dissertation in eighteenth century children's literature this year, so as a gesture of thanks for her hard work I've done a little restoration for her today.  She surprised me last month by saying she's actually used my restorations as examples in the introductory undergraduate classes she teaches. Well here's something closer to her real world scholarship: a William Blake illustration for Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life.

"Wow - they look so different from the Blake versions - so much softer" was her first reaction.  After a moment of poking through the bibliographic notes I confirmed a suspicion: this is indeed the Blake version, scanned from his original sketch for the frontispiece.

Here's wishing the digital file were higher resolution.  The Library of Congress has been digitizing its collection for fifteen years; some of the older digitization isn't quite at the technical excellence of their recent work.  Equipment and formats have changed, and their staff has gotten better at it.  So this might be a viable featured picture candidate at English Wikipedia but the higher Wikimedia Commons technical requirements would exclude it from serious candidacy.

Nonetheless, a medium resolution file is usually less work to restore--the smaller damage just doesn't show up at this resolution.  So I did a quick restoration for Awadewit to cheer her on through the final months of the dissertation.  First, let's have a peek at the version of this image which appeared in the printed edition.

This is basically a mirror image of the sketch.  Maybe the Library of Congress has been spoiling me: the file that was in use at the Wikipedia article was less than 50 kilobytes.  It's stained, faded, yellowed, and suffers from distortion, plus the crop is so tight that it would be difficult to correct the problems if the filesize were large enough to work with.

Really, it's best to restore files that are at least 10 megabytes in uncompressed format.  I don't call an image large unless it's more than 100 megabytes.  On a fairly frequent basis other Wikipedians ask me to restore material that is only a few dozen kilobytes.  I can't produce a featured picture from that; the magic has its limits.

Getting back to this project, though, one issue worth mentioning is how to deal with staining.  Stains can be a problem when they occur over important parts of an image.  In this instance a large brown stain occurs on the central figure's knee.  I've blown this up to about double the original resolution.

This stain consists of two parts: a small deep brown spot surrounded by a much larger faint discoloration.  First I got rid of the small spot.  The easiest way to do that is with a clone stamp at 35% hardness, but with a careful and steady hand it's possible to get a more natural effect with the healing brush.  The healing tool algorithm usually works poorly in the middle of narrow stripes, but if the sample point is the same distance from a line as the destination point the tool can give a pleasant blended effect.  It's quite tricky to do this and often takes several tries because if it isn't done just right the tool will create an ugly smear.

Unnatural healing brush smears are a hallmark of poor image editing; that's something to really avoid.  If you feel like trying this trick the way to get the feel for it is by backing up through the history when a smear occurs (and you will make smears--a lot of them--so don't feel bad).  Don't try to re-heal a smear; it'll only smear worse.  Just choose a new source point, try to line it up just so, and eventually the spot will vanish perfectly.

Of course there's still the larger stain.  Low intensity stains are basically localized color problems.  So I treat this like any other local color correction: choose the selection lasso, set feathering to 10 pixels (which is not very much, but appropriate for a small image), and create an adjustment layer to manually adjust the colors.  Think of "brown stain" as "deficient in blue" and nudge the RGB sliders until the colors appear consistent.  Don't try to be hasty and copy the same tweaks to the light, medium, and dark ranges: often the best results come from slightly different settings.

With additional work the final version comes out looking like this.

Three cheers for Awadewit and her Dissertation!   (Now Awadewit, go finish it). ;)

Spinal curvature

One problem with book scans occurs when the printing goes close to the spine and the page fails to lie flat on the scanner bed.  The subject here is a detail from the Mayan ruins at Palenque and the illustration carries particular historic importance: it was drawn by Ricardo Almendáriz in 1787 during the initial excavation of Palenque and his illustrations formed part of the first significant archaeological report in the Americas.

The lower left corner on this image makes it a bit more challenging than the other perspective crops of recent posts because the others could all be corrected with a single perspective crop.  This requires multiple perspective fixes.  After the first set of changes the lower left corner still curls upward and inward.  The effect is most apparent at the horizontal border line.  That distortion affects the entire far left column of the image.

We're lucky in one way: other than border, only the lower half of this drawing contains information at far left.  So the solution is to select the distorted segment from the seated figure at left and create a new image file solely for that partial figure, then perform a second perspective crop on that segment only. After that, copy and paste the segment to the original image as a new layer and align it so the correction becomes invisible.  It's easier said than done.

Here's how it appears after the correction.  The change is subtle but it alters the proportions of the figure's hip and spine.  Alignment and blending require judicious erasure, partial redrawing of border lines, and minor edits at high resolution.

Other than that the restoration was routine.  The drawing is in better shape than most comparable material of the same age, but it still took several patient hours of dirt and stain removal to complete the work.

One of the interesting things about the Almendáriz drawings is that he recorded features which have since been destroyed by exposure to the elements.  Comparison against the remaining undamaged bas reliefs shows that his work was unusually accurate for its era.  So this remains useful to modern scholars.

Heritage

At right is a spectacular portrait of Willy Brandt, former German chancellor and Nobel Peace Price winner.  He was mayor of West Berlin when the Berlin Wall was built.  His likeness was nominated for featured picture at English Wikipedia earlier this year, but failed on technical issues.  Brandt's portrait was part of a very generous donation from the German National Archive.  Yet at 568 × 800 pixels, file size: 47 KB it just didn't meet the minimum criteria.

Several months ago I performed a courtesy restoration on a higher resolution portrait of Konrad Adenauer, which unfortunately can't be uploaded to Commons because the Bundesarchiv retained full copyright over its high resolution digitized files.

So if it's possible, I'd like to renew the request to Bundesarchiv to seek selected copies of higher resolution material.  The lighting and expression on this Brandt portrait is brilliant; he deserves attention on the site's main page.

There's another reason to make this request.  There's another image that was nominated for delisting nearly two years ago, and it was retained because a cultural institution donated a higher resolution version.  Featured content criteria tend to rise over time, and the lower resolution version had been nominated and promoted before the standards changed.  It's quite famous.

The final days of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  Many thanks to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for their assistance.  The lower resolution version had been on the route to delisting.  Since then the photograph has been featured on several projects including the Turkish Language Wikipedia.  It's amazing how far one donation can go toward raising awareness.

One reason I'd love to be able to upload a better resolution version of Adenauer or Brandt is for balance; not everybody in Germany during World War II agreed with the government's policies at that time.  Adenauer and Brandt were among the people who helped rebuild Germany into a respectable country again.  It takes a special sort of leadership to steer a country that had gone off on such a bad course back to stability and democracy.
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Image credit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_B_145_Bild-F057884-0009,_Willy_Brandt.jpg

When you've seen one Edwardian field marshal, you've seen 'em all

Props to Roger Davies!  The Library of Congress staff has emailed to confirm that they will be correcting their records regarding the identity of the man in the recently promoted featured picture at right.  This is not Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener but Frederick Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts.  Roger Davies noted differences in age and facial structure, and in particular the Victoria Cross at lower right which Roberts received, but not Kitchener.  Roger Davies also found two reliable sources for Earl Roberts as the subject of this poster: the Smithsonian Institution and VADS (a joint project of the Imperial War Museum, the British Arts & Humanities Research Council, and Manchester Metropolitan University).

The updated information should be available at the Library of Congress website within a month.

In the meantime we'll need to do a little bit of housekeeping at the wikis because the featured picture candidacies and the relevant filenames all contained Lord Kitchener's name.

This goes to show that reliable sources aren't always perfect.  With good reference works it is possible to improve the data that major institutions can share regarding their collections.  Here's another recent example: a portrait of John Surratt that the Library of Congress is updating per my feedback.

John Surratt was  a Confederate spy who conspired to kidnap Abraham Lincoln in 1864 and who was suspected of conspiring in Lincoln's assassination.  His mother Mary Surratt was hanged by the United States Federal Government for her part in the Lincoln assassination plot.  John Surratt survived by fleeing to Europe and serving as a Papal zouave; the statute of limitations on most of his activities had expired before he was identified and extradited.

The Library of Congress had misidentified him as the son of "Annie Surratt" and had misidentified his uniform as an Egyptian Army zouave rather than a Papal zouave.  The LoC record also dated this photograph "between 1860 and 1875".  The source Lincoln's Assassins: Their Trial and Execution by James L. Swanson and Daniel R. Weinberg narrows that time frame to 1866-1867 because the photograph was taken by an American photographer and was sold during Surratt's 1867 trial.  Swanson and Weinberg also confirm the other corrections.  The Library of Congress staff recently wrote with thanks for the corrections; their website should be updated within a few weeks.

I've started a restoration on Surratt's portrait but gotten sidetracked.  Interested in completing the project?  Welcoming collaborators; coaching available.

In the bigger picture, this sort of assistance constitutes a significant motivation for cultural institutions to digitize their collections for the public.  For example, a Swedish archive called Regionarkivet recently uploaded several dozen high resolution public domain photographs by major nineteenth century photographers to Wikimedia Commons in the hope that volunteers would locate more information about the material.  When this type of effort succeeds it achieves the best goals of the free culture movement.  I encourage everyone who can provide assistance to join the effort.  Digital editing skill isn't required; all it takes is a little research.

Not that it matters, but I've given Roger an award for his research.  If people like this I could submit it for formal barnstar approval.

Bright ideas

It can be delightful to root through obscure corners of the Library of Congress website and unearth something special such as a high resolution full book scan of a beautifully illustrated volume.  This self-portrait of William Blake comes from Songs of Innocence and Experience, published 1794.  He's an important painter and poet; Wikipedia ought to have a featured portrait.

Every restoration has its challenges.  The main challenge in this one is that the aged paper does not lie flat.  Scanner light is highly directional so digitization enhances small buckles in the original image.  You'll see this as a series of bright and dark horizontal bands near his forehead, chin, and chest.  The example below is an interim save after initial dirt and scratch removal.

 

Distracting, isn't it? The brightness gradient tool can be used here, but it only helps a little bit.  The page itself is slightly brighter at the lower left corner.  So one quick gradient adjustment at a very slight setting is a first step toward correcting the problems.  In this instance I used about 2% opacity.  Most of these issues have to be solved another way. 

The solution here is to look at each buckled area in terms of what it changes about the image: brighter above, darker below.  This can be fixed incrementally with multiple feathered mask selections in a series of brightness adjustment layers: brighten the dark sections and darken the light sections.  The trick is to make plenty of layers, draw each one separately, and to change just a little bit at a time.  This restoration went through 30 adjustment layers, with feathering staring at 40 pixels and decreasing to 25 and 10 pixels, nudging the brightness about two notches at a time (sometimes one and never more than three).  The direct result of that follows:

That's more like it: almost like taking a gentle iron and pressing the paper flat (which of course we don't dare do to the actual physical copy).  The final restoration added only moderate changes to curves and color balance.

Images that have nuanced brightness or staining issues can be an exception to the usual time allocation in digital restoration.  Usually the bulk of restoration time goes into dirt and scratch removal.  In this instance dirt and scratches were minimal, but layered masks required plenty of attention.  The most difficult instances I've restored have needed as many as 200 brightness adjustment layers to correct for this type of problem.