Sunday, August 1, 2010

Restoring Daguerreotypes Digitally

Cincinnati, 1848, Cincinnati Public Library
Pete's friend, Ross, is getting his Ph.D. in computer vision at the University of Rochester. One of his recent projects involved magnifying and restoring a series of daguerreotypes taken by Charles Fontayne and William Porter on September 24, 1848 in Cincinnati. Strung together, the daguerreotypes show two miles of the city's waterfront.

A story about the restoration project appears in this month's Wired magazine. The article and images are available online — I highly recommend them. The level of detail they were able to recover is truly amazing.

2 comments:

Andy Hall said...

These images are important for many reasons, among them that they are the oldest photographic representations of the Western Rivers steamboat, a uniquely American craft. The late Fred Way, Jr., dated the starting point for his standard reference work of steamboat "biographies" from this image.

Amy Coffin, MLIS said...

What an amazing project. Thank you for sharing the article. I've been staring at the detail in the images for minutes now.