After finishing the last one, I decided to check it up against some actual old photographs of the Titanic (since it’s the Titanic dress and all) and re-do the effects to more closely match an actual picture in terms of how much is oversaturated, undersaturated, and the noise. Turns out there’s not nearly as much noise - I’ve personally worked with some scans of some really old stuff and lemme say - the pictures of the Wright Brother’s hanger are incredibly noisy. But I guess, referencing that picture of the Titanic, either the intervening decade saw stellar leaps in image quality, or they used a much better camera for the Titanic (which you’d imagine), or both.
 
Image referenced:
 

 
Sky - can barely make out any detail  
Dark hair - can also barely make out any detail  
Deeply shadowed areas (see into the stacks of chairs) - completely black
 
That’s what I focused on with the light curves, and coincidentally, it looks like the deck wood on the Titanic roughly matches the railing behind Rarity. So I’d say pretty good. The edit is a bit more grainy, but I think it wouldn’t turn out as well if it weren’t, since pony images are rather smooth (and that’d also make grains stand out more).
 
Description from other edit: (original edit at: >>1612554 )
 

Decided to play around with some old-timey effects again. Me and a friend were looking through the Raristocrat tag and we saw someone did one just by making it black and white, so I decided to show him some neat tricks I’d learned just using GIMP.

Desaturate, noise, then you play with the color curves (all 3 at once) to mimick the effect of old cameras having a rather narrow exposure range - where shadowed areas get very dark, and bright areas get very bright.

All credit to the original artist for this fantastic piece, though I’m somewhat proud of how well the edit turned out looking in terms of recreating the “old-timey” effect.

It’s a really, really neat reminder, IMO, of how MLP is taking place in a 1910’s-ish setting (no automobiles, but x-rays in hospitals, propeller-driven airships, skyscrapers in Manehatten and relatively modern culture - certainly closer to modern than 1800 culture, at least). When you suddenly realize that, it brings on a really amazing appreciation of understanding our ancestors and the lives they lived - if not a somewhat chilling reminder that one day our current lives will be considered ancient history. Though personally I like to think more of how it brings the past to life and helps you realize we’re not so different from our great-great-grandparents, after all. Helps make the past seem a lot more relatable.

Original image:

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