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Wikipedia:Valued picture candidates/Mount Vesuvius from Pompeii

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Original 1 - Visible from Pompeii are the two craters of the Mount Vesuvius volcano. In 79 AD, Vesuvius erupted violently, decimating Pompeii and Herculaneum and killing between 10,000 and 25,000 people. Vesuvius's last eruption was in 1944, and if it were to erupt like this again, scientists speculate 600,000 people would be killed.
Original 2 - New scan from original negative. Should the colors be adjusted to match the gloom of the older version?
Colors adjusted - proposed color-corrected version of the new scan to remove the perceived yellowish cast

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Morn (talkcontribs) 03:14, 6 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reason
Taken in the extremely historic district of Pompeii, which we all know, this image is excellent in that it shows how close Vesuvius is to Pompeii. It is somewhat low res, but the EV overtakes that. I think the image should also be added to Pompeii, somewhere.
Articles this image appears in
Mount Vesuvius
Creator
Apparently Morn
This is VPC, not FPC. ceranthor 21:18, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support as creator ;-) --- Seeing that this image remains quite popular (for several years it was featured on the WP-EN frontpage on the anniversary of the eruption), perhaps I should see if I can track down the negative and have it scanned at higher resolution. At the time I had to use a print, and unfortunately more than about 1 megapixel resolution was out of the question. Morn (talk) 02:59, 4 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

As you can see, a higher-quality scan of the image is now available. If you feel the colors need to be adjusted, Nezzadar, adjust away.

I sort of like the bloody tone of the walls on the original image, but I'm not sure if this was due to color correction in the Gimp in the old version or if the new version has been excessively adjusted towards more yellow and green by the lab. It was a pretty overcast day, so I think it should look a little more foreboding. Morn (talk) 23:15, 5 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  • I'm trying to get yet another scan (tomorrow perhaps), this time from a large print. The problem with the negative scans (#2 and #3) is that the lab always boosts the greeens (the grass) and blues (the sky) ridiculously. What I'd really like to obtain is a high-resolution scan without weird colors. We'll see if they can do it... Morn (talk) 23:36, 11 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Well, it looks like it will be a few more days before I get the "new new scan." :( Morn (talk) 17:37, 14 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Original 3 - "New, new" scan from large-format print.

Here's the final scan, now with better colors and very high resolution. Had to scale it down a little, because apparently the image thumbnailer can only handle images up to 12.5 megapixels. Morn (talk) 20:38, 28 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. For the time being, I've put version #4 on the Mt. Vesuvius page, because that's the one I like best at this point. (The images also look different depending on whether your browser honors embedded color profiles or not. I.e., Safari does, Camino apparently doesn't.)

I've used PNG in case somebody wants to try out a different color grading. Re-compression of JPEGs generally yields artifacts. And besides, Wikipedia/Wikimedia allows uploads up to 100 MB, so I think it makes sense to use a lossless format. I don't want to have to scan this thing again every few years just because everyone's screen resolution has gone up a little and their CPUs can now handle higher-res images without croaking... Morn (talk) 22:08, 3 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Promoted File:Vesuvius from Pompeii (hires version 2 scaled).png --Makeemlighter (talk) 23:40, 4 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]