Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Tartan Ribbon.jpg

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First color photo[edit]

The first permanent color photograph, taken by James Clerk Maxwell in 1861.

The very first color photo. Scanned, descreened, levels adjusted. This is a better scan than the previous one, which I overwrote. Despite the low image quality, this has enormous historical significance, "enc" is 100%.

  • Nominate and support --Janke | Talk 06:50, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • question - what is it a picture of? Debivort 07:35, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. I agree on the enc, but we shouldn't lose sight of those other criteria. I cannot consider this one of WPs best works. And, forgive my ignorance, didn't we just promote another first color photograph yesterday? --Dschwen 09:34, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. According to the James Clerk Maxwell article, it's a tartan ribbon. He took three photos and superimposed them. Stephen Turner (Talk) 09:37, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. After some thought, I'm going to oppose this one. I can't deny the historical significance, but the quality is so poor that I don't think it can be featured. Debivort's question says it all. Stephen Turner (Talk) 15:55, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support. The guidelines specifically have a clause for images like this. It is impossible to take the first color photo again. The first photo ever taken is a FP, so why not this? Very historically significant and encyclopedic. I think historic photos is an area that is lacking in FP, and I hope that isn't because the technical qualities were worse back then.--Andrew c 16:52, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Hmmm, I'd happily demote that one too. Stephen Turner (Talk) 17:53, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • Are you forgetting that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia? FPs function as "teasers" to draw readers from the front page to an article (just like featured articles). I think both the very first photo, and the first color photo do deserve that. --Janke | Talk 18:12, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Agree with Andrew c. Alvesgaspar 17:35, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support A true color photo - in 1861!? I, for one, do not believe image quality can even come close to detracting from encyclopedic value with a historic picture like this. Thegreenj 18:44, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support for historic value. howcheng {chat} 21:48, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per nom and Andrew c. --KFP (talk | contribs) 21:51, 22 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per Andrew c and Janke. User:Sd31415/Sig 01:41, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Support Beautiful picture of tartan. Kidding, its mega-historical. What other 1st pictures are left? 1st space picture? 1st digital picture? We should get those too. -Ravedave (help name my baby) 05:39, 23 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Too historically important for me to oppose. NauticaShades 10:12, 23 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Historical significance is incredibly high. | (Unsigned vote by AndonicO)\
  • Support, as the quality may not be great, but the historical importance makes this feature-worthy. --RandomOrca2 01:51, 24 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support per historical significance. (BTW, this is SO much more fun than AfD ;-) Mike 21:30, 25 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Support as per Andrew C Sotakeit 18:09, 27 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Oppose Sorry, but this is a scan of a book print of the first color photograph, and the halftoning is blatantly obvious. Find a faithful reproduction of the original and it would be FP. ~ trialsanderrors 19:12, 27 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The halftoning is filtered out. What you think is halftoning, is in fact irregular graininess (look at the full-res image), probably from the original - an offset printing halftone is always regular, and would furthermore cause a moiré if not filtered. I don't think it would be easy to find a reproduction that was not printed, in one form or another. --Janke | Talk 21:09, 27 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It might not actually be halftoning but this image leaves many questions open at which stages it was altered from the original slides. I could actually imagine that some of the graininess comes from the paper surface of the scanned book. There are also questions about the hue of the reproduction, as compared to, e.g., this or this version. And finally, looking at the picture of the original slides, this version has been restored rather clumsily (do a close-up of the lower left corner to see the masked scratches). In total, it's neither an acceptable faithful reproduction of the original nor a very good restoration like some of the Prokudin-Gorskii images from the Library of Congress. We should put this on hold until a better version canbe found. ~ trialsanderrors 00:24, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The links you gave are to very inferior scans. Also, you cannot define a "right" color, since it depends on the projection setup and filters used to view the image. In fact, the image is partly "false color", since there were no panchromatic emulsions available in 1861 - the red color was fortuitiously recorded because it also reflected ultraviolet, which was exposed on the red plate. (If you can find a superior scan, feel free to upload it, but I doubt any is freely available.) --Janke | Talk 21:13, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not promoting any of those to be considered FP. But I also don't consider a second generation image with unidentified provenance, unidentified degree of manipulation and printing artifacts FP worthy. This is a pretty clear violation of the "accurate" criterion. There is no compulsion to make this version a FP just because alternatives are worse. ~ trialsanderrors 01:11, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - great work on getting a much better scan than my version. Warofdreams talk 16:48, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Promoted Image:Tartan Ribbon.jpg --KFP (talk | contribs) 20:53, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Post-promotion comment I added a response from the James Clerk Maxwell Foundation to the talk page. ~ trialsanderrors 20:24, 4 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
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