On 6/20/06, Steve Bennett stevage@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.