On 8/13/07, GerardM <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
Improving of the 'quality' of pictures is not in and of itself something
that is not without controversy. There have been fierce fights in the past
over exactly this subject and there are a great many people that do not
upload to Commons as a result.
Well at least the changes proposed aren't the sort which would enable
some of the true horrors I've seen on commons.
For example, someone decided that a 3/4 view of a camera wasn't as
good as a full front view. They twisted the image electronically to
make it look kinda like a frontal view, but this left part of the
camera body missing. So they painted it in. I'd take less issue with
the fact that their paintjob looked poor were it not for the fact that
they got the shape of the camera body quite wrong. :( So the
EnWikipedia (at least) article had a inaccurate hack job of an image
for a few weeks for that particular camera before I noticed it and
reverted the image on commons. :(
Compared to that I'm not too worried about brightness/color/cropping..
etc.. but I think that using an external site for this is completely
wrong. Dynamic crops should be a native feature of our repository,
you should be able to upload a single image then define alternative
views which are on the fly generated crops. Other really simple
alterations (like most of the ones offered by that site) could be
offered this way.
I played with the site (on a friends computer, it requires flash), the
interface is snazzy no doubt, but all the manipulations it offers save
red-eye are things that Imagemagic could provide... I could pretty
easily setup a basic ajax interface that offered those filters and let
you tweak their settings in real time.