Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Gasshukoku suishi teitoku kōjōgaki

Gasshukoku suishi teitoku kōjōgaki

Current FP (reuploaded by MER-C's request) - a horrible embarrassment.

Suggested replacement - Three men, believed to be Commodore Matthew C. Perry (center), with Commander Anan and Captain Henry Adams, during their meeting with the Emperor of Japan. These meetings led to the Convention of Kanagawa which opened Japan to the West after centuries of isolation.

Alternative 2 - Minimal restoration. This one has the correct colours, but beyond removing the masking tape (WHY?!?!), I've done nothing else.

Reason

An older version (which is rather humiliating in how badly I handled it - I wasn't yet comfortable working in colour, and so didn't do most of the restoration) passed FP. This new version replaces the old, and thus needs reconfirmation. This was heavily damaged, so no restoration could be perfect; However, this is also one of the only Japanese artworks depicting Commodore Perry's opening up of Japan. As I said on WT:FPC, I wanted to have this reconfirmed after the cleanup, and also, as this was an incredibly hard one, to catch anything I missed. I don't intend to clean up everything - it would look weird to have three heavily-degraded figures on perfect paper - but I can fix anything people find necessary, or any artefacts of the extensive cleanup.

Articles this image appears in

Matthew C. Perry Convention of Kanagawa

Creator

Unknown.

• Delist and replace --Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 11:54, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
• Could you upload a before version? It makes more sense to treat this as a delist/replace nomination. MER-C 12:00, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
  • Hmm. Sure. Though unless the old one is confirmed, I'd like to delete the old one afterwards - it really is embarrassing. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 15:48, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
• Delist and replace not so much of an embarassment, think of it as an educational experience. Cat-five - talk 23:13, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
• Comment I don't personally suggest it, but Alternative 2 is uploaded just in case someone wanted less restoration. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 09:57, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
• I like the newly restored version, though I feel perhaps too much of the character of the paper has been removed - the gradient in the stain on the right-middle for example; also the midline crease has only been removed in places, why not be consistent? Though these are pretty minor points and if I had not seen the original I might not have noticed. Alternative 2 seems pretty washed out compared to the original. I still support delist and replace as it is an improvement. |→ Spaully^₪† 10:11, 27 March 2009 (GMT)

I removed the midline where I thought it made the art a bit confusing (For instance, Perry's right (on our left) arm is already a bit hard to follow due to the damage creating all sorts of false sight lines) but didn't want to remove it completely. As for paper texture in the stain... basically, I could not get it to match colour while still having a convincing grain - You can do that pretty easily if you want to take the paper to white, but pristine white paper with the severe uncorrectable damage of this image? Not a good idea. After a long attempt to get the levels to work with the natural paper colour, in the end, I had to use paper from elsewhere to cover over the stain. It's one of the compromises that, unfortunately, sometimes happen in restoration.

There's certainly other options I could have taken, and another restorer might choose different options. Maybe in a few years, I'll come back to this and make new choices again. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 10:41, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

• Delist and replace (suggested alt) per nom. Spencer^{T♦Nominate!} 01:28, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Replaced in place MER-C 09:03, 8 April 2009 (UTC)