Eolake and I were talking about this movie yesterday, so I thought I'd dredge up an old image from down Memory Lane for our viewing pleasure. Admittedly, the quality of it is not what it once was, but there's only so much I can do with an old JPEG image that has its pixels all clumped up in bunches in the wrong places. I've put this through PhotoStudio about three times, and through Neat Image, the noise-removal program about 3 as well, and then I used the Wacom Pen Tablet to clean up some of the stuff those others could not do anything about, and it still leaves a lot to be desired. But I tried, Folks.... This is the best I can do for Mistress Lisa, fifteen years later.
Dana, in an interview, says that this movie turned her fans right off, because it ruined her 'America's Sweetheart' image, and so it was a box-office turkey. Maybe so, but I'm only one of millions that loved it, because among other things, it proved that Dana could wear something other than a stethoscope and army fatigues, and look wonderful.
How comes that a digital file (jpeg) deteriorates over time? I've always thought the quality of a file would be the same forever.
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ReplyDeleteI tried to provide a link to a page in Wikipedia about this, but it didn't activate properly, so I had to remove it.
ReplyDeleteJPEG files are called 'lossy' because they develop problems with their arrangements of pixels as time goes by. PNG files, like the ones Microsoft chose for its scalable icons in Windows Vista (and Win-7) being based on bitmap format, hold their contents better and are also able to do things with transparency, which JPEG files
cannot.
If you have any old VCR tapes around that you've had for years, you maybe notice that when you try to play them back, they often show images that seem to be seen through
shimmering 'heatwaves' or similar
defects. This is because the tape is either losing its magnetic film because the iron oxides of that are separating from the tape, or because it is losing its magnetism,
(much like I did after I hit 50) and so there just isn't as much hair on the mohair as there used to be. The resulting picture is a washed-out or pale imitation of its former self. That's why DVDs were developed - they don't suffer from that kind of problem.
But how exactly that translates to
a JPEG image, I'm not sure - I just know that older JPEG images aren't nearly as sharp and clear as freshly-created new ones are.
In the older ones, the colors in pixels (or rather the pixels which create the colors) tend to clump up into dark lines along the edges of an image, or into round blobs in
central parts of it, and then the image looks like somebody's got a bad case of pimples or freckles, or tiny wrinkles, when they really didn't have at the time the image was first made.
There are several programs designed to clean up these 'noisy' older images, such as Neat Image, but none of them are perfect - I've used Neat Image on this pic of Dana Delany, and it still isn't nearly as clean and sharp as it was originally. There are limits to how much correction is possible, and none of the programs available can restore 100% of the original image. Again, I'm not sure exactly why. It's got something to do with magnetism and polarization, and opposites attracting and all that.