Not that this post has anything to do about baseball…

Last weekend, we went to the art museum, to see their Art in Bloom extravaganza. In addition to photographing elements of that show, I also took a few pictures of other artworks in the permanent collection. I offer here two pairs of pictures for comparison. The ones on the left were taken last Sunday, while the ones on the right were taken some time ago. By comparing these before and after shots, one can see the onward march of technology and [meh] technique.

Let’s start with the Renoirs. These two are furthest apart in time, with the one on the right being taken in 2011. In both pairs the newer pics on the left were taken using my still new to me iPhone 12 Pro, while the ones on the right were taken using various Canon point-and-shoot cameras. The newer photographs were postprocessed using Adobe Photoshop Elements 2021 and the older photos were processed using older versions of that product.

The most noticeable difference between the two versions is that the older one has a distinct yellowish hue, while in the newer one, the colors are much more vibrant. This is an artifact of the Canons. Contrary to what Anne thinks, I do not believe that the museum had “cleaned” the painting in the interim. The other main difference is that is that the newer version has a wider field of view. This is technique. Standing in front of the painting it is difficult to take a picture directly normal to a painting. This leads to a skewed image. Cropping those images requires cutting out more of the original picture for crisp edges. Lately I have begun using the skew tool in Photoshop that allows me to remove the skewness of the original shot, without removing so much of the painting.

If you enlarge both photos, you can see that the newer image is twice the size of the older one. I used to size my photos to 600 pixels across, because using this blog’s WordPress theme that is the normal maximum width displayed without zooming into a shot. But I have found that those smaller images did not look as good as ones with more pixels, even is those extra pixels are not displayed.

Like its more famous adherent Seurat, Luce used the painting technique of pointillism. In the museum there is a Seurat hanging next to this one, but I feel that this is the better painting. Comparing these two photographs the older one, taken in 2019, appears blurrier.  A couple of things lead to this difference. Introduced with Elements 2021 were two new editing techniques, shake and haze reduction. The first technique interpolates between pixels to create a sharper image. The second removes haze that is often not even in the painting.