On 8/13/07, GerardM gerard.meijssen@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.