Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/March 2025/Op-ed
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Notes on a featured picture |
- By Adam Cuerden
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Original -
Restored
This brilliant image was brought to my attention by Hawkeye7 about two years ago, around the time that American logistics in the Western Allied invasion of Germany reached featured article status. You may note there's a white bit on the left, coming from the left edge and covering over part of the hair of the soldier holding the flag.
...And I promptly... utterly failed to do anything with the image, because repairing that seemed such a daunting task. You can see the shape of the hair behind the repair, and the person is pretty blurry, so there's honestly enough there to know what the image should look like at the end without it feeling outright misleading. However, the fixes weren't working: Restoration is kind of a specialised toolset: I generally do repairs using the clone and healing brushes to bring other parts of the image (which have the original film grain) in to fix the damaged part, and that just not working here.
But we're all learning all the time, and here we are. I've been dealing with a lot of images with some sort of issues with faded areas, or water stains a lot of late, and some of the tricks you have to use very subtly to fix that kind of issues turned out to work really well for this cruder problem. I think I'm also a little better at dealing with things that are out-of-focus.
I should probably make a point out of this, like, it just goes to show that it's worth going back to Wikipedia projects that you've had to give up before, but, let's be honest: I'm excited about the image, love promoting Hawkeye's work... and really wanted to brag a bit.
Anyway, I'd say it's been a great month for featured and A-level content: Six and a half featured articles (Fall of George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence is fascinating, probably of interest to people in the project, but it's more about the consequences of a rebellion crossed with smaller scale actions), six featured pictures, and five A-levels all came about in February. Let's try to keep it up!
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