User:Mvuijlst/Profile
Michel Vuijlsteke
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Background
I first started painting on computers back in the 1980s. Character mode drawings on a TRS-80 Model I, then graphics on a ZX Spectrum, then moving away from joysticks toward mice and more sophisticated things on an Atari ST with Degas Paint, moving into photorealism and more than 256 colours with Spectrum 256 still on the Atari, and then finally "coming home" to Photoshop with Photoshop 2.5 in the early 1990s.   Spent a couple of years working in a pre-press company in the 1990s, mostly developing web sites but doing Photoshop, Illustrator and QuarkXPress work on the side, and then in the late 1990s my passion for history and genealogy met my passion for image manipulation. Entire family photo archives were scanned in and restored, over the course of several years. Most of the restoration was minor -- brightness and contrast, faded colours -- but some work was more extensive, with facial raconstruction, erm, stuff. Yes, I do sometimes cringe when I see what I did back then: the healing brush and non-destructive editing really were game changers. I was browsing Google's Life archive the other day and I relaissed there were lots of public domain images in there that were not on Wikipedia but should be -- I mean, there wasn't even a decent high resolution image of Thomas Edison! And then I (re)discovered the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs catalog, and since then I've been earmarking image after image for restoration. I have no preference for any specific subject matter or type of image; I'll typically have up to a dozen ongoing images, ranging from simple dust-and-scratches-and-histogram affairs to images that need literally man-days of work. I must've started editing on Wikipedia somewhere in 2002 or 2003; this account started editing in May 2004. Low-level editing, nothing controversial, adding and modifying here and there whenever I came across things. I'm thoroughly disgusted by the whole deletionist wave hitting Wikipedia by the way -- the moment they're coming for the images, I'm out of here. Seriously. I find the MMORPG aspects of it all (edit counts and administratorship and stuff) vaguely ridiculous, but hey, who am I? I've been advised to submit some of he images I restore to WP:FPC just to show people that restoring work is going on, so I do, not worrying too much whether images get "promoted" or not. Oh yes, I plan on writing a manual for restoring images one of these weeks/months/years. Don't hold your breath. |
Contact details
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Example work
Part of a series of pictures depicting Frances Densmore at the Smithsonian Institution in 1916 where she was recording Blackfoot chief Mountain Chief for the Bureau of American Ethnology. In this picture, Mountain Chief is pictured as listening to a recording. See more of Michel Vuijlsteke's work at his gallery |
