On 6/20/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Yep. Look, while we're at it, some more requests:
In-place modifications of the following types:
- increase/decrease contrast
- increase/decrease brightness
That thought of this makes me uncomfortable. Many people have
uncalibrated monitors and weird tastes in brightness and contrast,
it's hard to be objective about such changes.. please see the
miniessay on the last bullet of my commons userpage
(
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell). Such knobs would
also encourage shed painting and create an unneccessary proliferation
of additional versions.
- rotate arbitrary angle
I don't think this can be done without loading the entire uncompressed
image into memory which pretty much makes it a non-starter.
[snip]
Totally in accordance with the wiki principle too: one
person takes a
happysnap and uploads it - the smallest effort possible. Someone else
discovers its imperfections, adds a straighten. Someone else increases
the contrast. Someone else defines a good thumbnail. Each person
contributes a small, atomic action, with the lowest cost of effort
possible.
It doesn't always play out so rosey... Sometimes someone spends hours
getting a photograph just right (because unlike wikitext, even in the
best case 98% of the work must be done by a single photographer) and
they are proud of their work. Then along comes a self appointed
wiki-photo expert... who goofs up the image to fit his tastes on his
uncalibrated display and insists that it's better. Perhaps the new
version is more contrasty, with over pumped saturation and
sharpness.... At first glance it's more eye catching, so other passers
by support the changed version, but it's lost it's depth, lost detail
in the shadow, or just lost it's ability to captivate for more than a
moment. Perhaps it's cropped to place the subject dead center,
destroying the careful balence achieved in the photo which guides the
eye...
We've had photographers leave in digust over this.
Wikinews permits unfree images (CC-BY-ND) as a result of this.
So I'm a bit hesitant to suggest we provided technical tools which may
encourage bad aspects of our behavior. But this has gone wayyyy
off-topic now. :) Once someone impliments some of this stuff we can
debate the merits of turning it on.