Wikipedia:Picture peer review/Beheadingchina1

Beheading in China

Japanese executioner prepares to behead a condemned Chinese man kneeling before his own grave, Tientsin China.

107 years haven't dimmed the dramatic tension of this photograph, which was shot during the time of the Boxer rebellion. What makes it effective for me is the man at right leaning to his side to get a better view. Admittedly soft focus; do the age and relative rarity of good non-Western photography from this era make up for it?

Original stereogram published by Underwood & Underwood, photographer unknown. Unretouched version Image:Beheadingchina.jpg appears in beheading. Cropped, cleaned up artifacts, adjusted histogram, and sharpened.

Nominated by: Durova^Charge! 05:50, 7 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments:

I prefer the retouched version; I flipped between images, and couldn't see any missing details in the retouched version at all. However, I'm not happy with the lack of presence in an article; the unretouched image is in beheading but I think that this image begs to be in a historical account of whatever is going on; the articles Foreign relations of Meiji Japan, Tianjin or Concessions in Tianjin appear to be possibilities. - Enuja (talk) 06:31, 7 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- I agree the image could be used in more articles. My undertaking has been to sift through the PD files for valuable photographs that have been underutilized and get them more of the attention they deserve. I feel a little awkward about sticking them into articles myself, though. Durova^Charge! 07:28, 7 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I've uploaded my edit, from LoC's tif file. IMHO it looks better than either of the versions here. --antilived^{T | C | G} 07:18, 7 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Seconder:

~~Support unretouched version~~ - Chilling, dramatic photo, quality appropriate to its time (considering the time it take for technology to spread from Europe to Asia at that time). The retouched version just blurs out too much details. Some more references would be good though. --antilived^{T | C | G} 06:06, 7 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- Thank you. I'll see what I can do about the caption. The Uncerwood & Underwood captioning is usually terse. Would you object to running the original with a minor crop to eliminate the cut-off figure at far left? Durova^Charge! 06:14, 7 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  - Actually on closer inspection the unretouched version is not a good scan. The chins of the people are pixelated, which is then upsampled and undergone noise reduction, which the retouched version puts even more on. I don't think the original film is so soft, and I would support a good scan of the original, but not this scan. --antilived^{T | C | G} 06:53, 7 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]