Together Again.

The care behind the work

The responsibility behind the photograph.

Now, don’t get me wrong, a decent filter can do a body good. I’m guilty. But when I’m working with history, I have a duty to be faithful to reality, even when that reality is inconvenient.

I work on these photographs because the people in them matter to me. That makes preserving their likeness part of the job. I keep the supplied source and check each treatment against it. Any detail supplied by reconstruction is an interpretation; it cannot become evidence just because it looks convincing.

I’ve put two digital treatments together so the differences can be seen in one photograph. The source I received had already been restored. I keep that version as a reference, because a convincing result still needs to be checked against what I actually have.

A few words worth knowing.

Identity drift

When a face gradually stops looking like the person in the source photograph.

Cumulative artifacts

Small mistakes that build up as each generated version becomes the starting point for the next.

Mottling

Uneven, blotchy patches of tone or color that can make skin look patchy or dirty.

Hallucinated texture

Detail the model supplies without support from the source, such as invented pores, wrinkles or fabric patterns.

Fine pores and lines are called microtexture. If a new pass adds lines to a face, I go back to the clean reference. I’m not giving an ancestor a fresh set of wrinkles just because a program decided they looked convincing.

Further reading: Repeated image editing · Image authenticity