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German instrument of surrender, World War II

[edit]
Original - The German instrument of surrender signed at Reims May 7, 1945.
Reason
Since the Japanese surrender document is up here's the German one too. I promise to switch back to photographs for a while if this gets boring. Restored version of Image:German instrument of surrender.jpg.
Articles this image appears in
Victory in Europe Day, End of World War II in Europe, German Instrument of Surrender
Creator
Office of War Information
  • Support as nominator --DurovaCharge! 00:03, 30 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. Can the names of the signatories be included on the image description page? NauticaShades 00:17, 30 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Support "Consensus Image". A great restoration of an extremely significant historical document. NauticaShades 00:33, 30 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support nominated restoration. Great encyclopedic value, and has a sheer wow factor for me. Mostlyharmless (talk) 03:01, 30 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I wonder what the point of this so called restoration is. You messed with the whitebalance. What is that based on? You removed a staple hole. So why didn't you remove the punch holes as well? Why didn't you make up a nice color for the signatures? Sorry, but I don't see the encyclopedic value of such a fantasy image. --Dschwen 12:31, 30 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Restoration began with removal of hundreds of dirt specks. For that I started working 7 pixels wide at 300% resolution, then moved in to 500% and 3-5 pixel selections for the extreme margins of the document and in places where the damage interacted with the text. That also means removing smudges and stains while maintaining a realistic paper grain. After hours of labor on those operations it becomes feasible to "mess with the white balance", which actually means reading the histogram and correcting for fade, then undoing yellowing via individual adjustments to the red/cyan and yellow/blue balance for the image's highlights, midtones, and shadows. If all of these operations are done well it becomes possible to replicate something close to the appearance when the document was new. The result is certainly much easier to read. The goal is Kansas, not Oz (see the Nebraska and Iowa restoration below). Operations performed during restoration are stated on the image page along with a link to the original, which is uploaded under separate filename. The occasional reader who prefers an unrestored document may access it. If you would like to learn restoration, Dschwen, I would be glad to coach you. Yet that comment goes over with an unpleasant edge of sarcasm. DurovaCharge! 14:33, 30 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • Ok, I agree, removing scanning artifacts and dirt is acceptable and maybe even useful and that is an aspect of your work I definitely appreciate (I'm sorry if the negative tone of my hasty comment sounded like I didn't). But my main point from below still stands. The whitebalance modification is pure guesswork (do you know for a fact what kind of paper was used, how was it bleached, what was the original hue?), and it (even if we assume you guessed correctly) only returns some aspects of the document closer to its original state. This is not useful in my opinion. I may create the impression to the casual reader that the document actually looked like this during one point in time, while as a matter of fact it never did. I'd rather have an accurate representation of how it looks now, than a wrong impresson of how it might have looked. Why is it even important to make it look like it was just signed? You mention legibility, but that strikes me as a weak argument, as the unmodified version seems just as legible to me. --Dschwen 15:05, 30 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Unrestored version.
Partial restoration- dirt and levels adjusted, but no color correction. Provided for comparison.

(outdent) Actually I'm creating a Wikibooks module on image restoration so a discussion like this one is very useful. Here's an interim version of the restoration on this image. In theory it makes sense to correct for dirt, stains, and fade only. The result, unfortunately, is that those corrections make yellow aging all the more apparent. Now we don't know with the same precision what shade the original paper was, but this is obviously incorrect. The archivist didn't note the paper type (they seldom do) so the next best solution is to examine the grain. Here it's characteristic of a typical wood pulp business paper. I adjusted accordingly, using layers and masks to partially compensate for the uneven brightness. A scan of this quality imposes limits on how effective that can really be (I often work from 50-200mb originals). So this restoration can't achieve the transformation from Image:Fultondesign.jpg to Image:Fultondesign7.jpg because the scanner settings on the surrender document generated slightly pixelated text. The result does bring the viewer substantially closer to the appearance when this document was new and increases legibility. As long as the alterations are notated and the original version is made available, I think that's an ethical approach. The editors who worry me are the ones who upload their alterations over the same filename as source files, and who induce .jpg degradation, and who make dubious changes without explaining what or why (my "favorite" was one who eliminated part but not all of an outdoor power line). If you'd like to draft a guideline for that, I'll get on board in an instant. Best regards, DurovaCharge! 18:22, 30 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • I think i would rather support the original. The restoration doesn't seem to add anything, or fix any problems. the document is definately important and featurable, but the restoration isn't necessary. Chris_huhtalk 12:46, 30 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I am confused at some of these sarcastic comments. The point of a restoration is to try to make the original more legible and convey the information better; to make the content more accessible. Durova has done exactly that, over and over in her image restorations. To try to approximate the original image, without losing valuable content (as much as possible), is the goal of these restorations, something that Durova does admirably. And this is another example of that. Whether the punch holes should be there or not is a matter of judgement. Whether the staple holes should be there or not is a matter of judgement. The presence of dirt will distort the "white balance" of course. Removing dirt is absolutely uncontroversial in this sort of situation, because dirt adds no useful information. Adjusting the levels should also be uncontroversial because it reduces the fading, and makes the document more legible. Adjusting the colorbalance, which reduces the yellowing of aged documents, is also totally appropriate because yellowing can reduce readability, and is just an artifact of the aging of non-deacidified paper. I wonder; is there some substantial difference between this document and the lightbulb patent restoration that was recently submitted?--Filll (talk | wpc) 15:23, 30 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Probably not, but i haven't reviewed that image. The lack of interesting original Photography reduced my motivation to visit this page as frequently as I used to. Anyhow, please note that the removal of dirt and the whitbalance are two different issues. --Dschwen 15:34, 30 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support the image for its EV and hopefully the consensus choice of original or restoration. I'm tentatively favoring Durova's interim restoration, as it strikes a balance between cleaning up the image and remaining authentic to it. While I understand the desire to show what it (probably) looked like when it was signed, fundamentally the scan captures what the document looks like now and thus changing it to what it might have looked like is an act of imagination. Suppose we have a recent photo of a person who was famous 20 years ago; we might adjust the levels, white balance, sharpness, or other elements of the photo, to compensate for the camera's imperfect ability to capture what he looks like. But if you use photoshop to remove wrinkles and change his hair color, to show how he looked when he was famous, I think that's treading on more dangerous ground, as it misleads the viewer into thinking it's a photographic depiction, when in fact it's more of an artistic rendering. I don't think Durova's restoration is as offensive as that, but still, perhaps it's better to err on the side of authenticity. Fletcher (talk) 22:50, 30 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment. But "authentic" when? When it was made - it almost certainly wasn't printed on yellow paper, or authentic now, in a deteriorated condition. Going as far as to call the restoration an artistic rendering, and comparing it to photoshopping out wrinkles ignores the fact that we know what the kind of paper this item was printed on looks like when it is in good condition, and thus we can be quite sure this approximates the original not exactly, but pretty well. The comparison above would be better more accurate if it was correcting for deterioration caused by aging of the print over time. Mostlyharmless (talk) 23:33, 30 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • No, that's not comparable: you're talking about restoring an old print of an old subject, while I'm talking about modifying a new image of an old subject to make the subject look new. In the former, you're just correcting the flaws of the medium (the print), which is fine, just like correcting the flaws of a camera or scanner is fine. In the latter, you're changing the appearance of the actual subject to match how you think it originally appeared years before the image was even taken. It's rather beside the point if your manipulation is plausible, because people are sensitive about an image being manipulated by a human, regardless of how good the manipulation is (cf. Arad's aborted FPC of Murano glassware that was actually a computer rendering). There's no fine line between good clean-up and excessive manipulation, and some people will see things differently, which is an argument for stating very clearly in the caption that the image has been manipulated.
Here's a different angle: ask yourself if the original document itself is important, or if the ideas represented on the document are more important. In this case, the physical piece of paper is of great historical value. Contrast that with another recent FPC, Edison's patent of the light bulb. The actual patent document was intended to secure Edison's intellectual property, and, not being Edison, I couldn't care less about it. It's Edison's design of the light bulb, likely one of the most far-reaching inventions of all time, that is really interesting. So to me it seems like an image restorer should use a lighter touch on documents that are intrinsically significant, and a heavier touch when the document itself is not so interesting, just the ideas represented on it. Personally, I kind of like to see that the surrender document is yellowed and a little beat up; it makes me think if I ever gainied access to the archive where it's stored, the paper would actually look like that in my hands. Fletcher (talk) 02:13, 31 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
That looks like a very subjective distinction, Fletcher. It would be easy to argue that the idea of unconditional surrender is represented here (rendering the document itself a formality), while an editor might envision himself or herself as a patent clerk or a potential investor having a meeting with Mr. Edison. My approach is to make both options available. Experience has shown that most people prefer restorations when the restoration is executed well. DurovaCharge! 07:00, 31 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Support Unrestored and Partial Restoration only Although I definitely prefer seeing photographs on the front page, I think this document has value. While the restored version is certainly cleaner, it is difficult to support a document that we can't prove is honest to the original. Considering how I can read the original just fine, and this is an encylcopedia, I prefer the versions with limited modifications. smooth0707 (talk) 00:49, 31 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Strong support Restored - the shade might not be the most important aspect of the image, but why not tend towards perfectness? diego_pmc (talk) 12:45, 4 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Promoted Image:German instrument of surrender1a.jpg. --Meldshal 21:22, 10 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Promoted Image:German instrument of surrender2.jpg - close call on which one; as I read it the originally nominated restored version just gets the nod. --jjron (talk) 07:41, 24 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

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