Fixing up Who We Are

Enhancing Flawed Original

Original Underexposed Photograph	Corrected Image

	Adding the Lynxes
Technical Information: The photo above is a section of a picture taken at a reception for Danish art historian, Bente Scavenius. Arnold handed his camera to the host. The flash was set to point vertically upward with wide angle beam to give a very soft evenly distributed light. To get everyone into the picture, the host stepped back through the doorway into the next room. Most of the light from the flash was lost, and the resulting negative was extremely underexposed. After creating a digitized tiff from the negative, the following corrections were made: The lightest point was raised to pure white, and the darkest was lowered to pure black. Since there was almost no detail in the dark areas, the contrast was increased for these darkest tones to make the details visible. The flash bouncing around many times on the warm coloured walls made the deeper tones very red. A cyan colour correction was added here. Arnold's tie was straightened, and the distracting background was made pure white. Finally the image was converted to a jpeg with low detail, giving a small image file that would load quickly into a browser. The image was sharpened considerably to make it look crisp at normal viewing size. The picture looks terrible if enlarged. And this is the point of the compression algorithm used in jpeg images - make a crummy image look really good to the eye at normal viewing sizes. The lynx images were extracted from photographs of lynxes in the wild and placed on the photograph at the right.