I copied Jenny West’s old postcard on Facebook and retouched it with my Picasa 3 program (free from Google). The result is as attached. Not perfect but an improvement aesthetically! I wonder if this is acceptable or would people rather see something less pleasing to the eye?
You never know with photos whether they have been retouched or not (illustrations in old mill books are often badly retouched, e.g. with the addition of sweeps that have vanished into the sky). In this case, I’ve not retouched anything to do with the mill itself, but as long as work done to it doesn’t actually change the details, I wouldn’t have thought it would matter.
The covering up of a white spot on some weatherboarding with a “patch” taken from another part of the tower would I guess be OK, but replacing a missing section of the boarding to pretty it up would be obviously undesirable.
The original image from the Mills Archive Facebook page can be seen at http://apps.facebook.com/myflickr/photos/40323207238/3134304738
Any comments appreciated.