Mikaeri said:
I'd like to hear more thoughts on this though, since I usually don't like it when there aren't clear guidelines to abide by.
I wasn’t sure whether I should post my thoughts on it, but as you explicitly asked for input, here are my critical thoughts on it.
I’d roughly distinguish between three cases: technical adjustments, alterations and restorations.
A technical adjustment for me is whatever is necessary to compensate some unavoidable technical shortcoming, like white-balancing a scan.
CodeKyuubi said:
https://puu.sh/viwYk/dd5ac99710.jpg
I don't think it's wrong to mess with the original (actual) scan in endeavoring to improve it (See above link). I've cut out a part of the near-final product I've got going to show the source scan underneath, while the top has been balanced to be as close to the artist's version as possible.
This is perfectly fine in my opinion. Any scanner invariably modifies an image by producing a scan that doesn’t match the source material. The person making the scan should try to undo those modifications to bring the scanned image as close as possible to the original, which involves having the original to actually look at it. From what I can tell, CodeKyuubi seems to be doing a good job at it. Simply taking whatever the scanner spits out, possibly even with some magical auto-correction, would be worse.
An alteration for me is anything that was altered from how the original artist intended it. The easiest example are of course nude filters, but this would also include brightening an image just because someone thinks it’s “too dark and depressing”, which might just what the artist had intended. Anything like that is just right out.
Now restorations is a big gray area that covers everything where one modifies an image in order to restore the original artist’s intention, such as redrawing covered or missing areas (de-texting, de-censoring, joining a double-page spread with the middle missing), but maybe also adjusting colors and levels of an image that seems off. The problem here is that one has to guess what the artist’s intention was and the guess can be wrong. That’s important to me because I highly value the artist’s intention and original work. The larger the redrawn/modified area, the more likely it is that one messes up, besmirching the artist’s work.
I’ve been doing redrawing for scanlations for a while and I always struggle with guessing what the artist originally had there. How thick and even does the artist draw lines? How does the artist draw hair? Hands? Place screentone? What kind of object might be placed there? A few days ago I made a small redraw for post #2685152 and even though it was a tiny, simple one, I had no idea what the short line above the arrowhead was for. It wasn’t on the other foot and the super-deformed characters in the artist’s other posts didn’t have it either. It was undoubtedly there, but what was it for? My guess was as good as anyone else’s, which is exactly why I think that restorations should be avoided if possible. The same goes for color-adjustments, even if done in good faith. Without having the original, how would one know what the digital image should look like?
The reason why I made that small redraw after all was because when the characters are actually printed and cut out, most of the arrow is removed and leaving part of the arrowhead there looks really stupid. But as it was an unnecessary third-party edit, I didn’t upload the modified image to Danbooru. I didn’t put the whole modified image elsewhere because I don’t want to upload another artist’s work to a site I cannot influence. I hope that even MS Paint will be enough to put that little patch in place for anyone who wants to print it.
Mikaeri said:
Again, theoretically there are "infinite ways" to improve an image, so picking just one or two to keep is particularly sketchy. We aren't primarily focused on hosting third-party edits, after all.
This is pretty much the gist of it.
CodeKyuubi said:
Understandably, this can also coincide with the touchy subject of artist intent. For example: post #1860988 vs post #2661855. Though a digital source, after some consideration I ultimately decided to color balance the image to remove what I felt was overly-excess red, even assuming a sunset light source, something hardliners might find unacceptable.
I have to admit that I haven’t actually looked at it because I have some of the tags blacklisted, but from what you described, it’s an edit that I don’t approve of. If the majority of viewers agreed that there was too much red in the image, then it might’ve been a poor choice by the artist, but that still doesn’t mean that you should tamper with it to “fix” it. Maybe the artist really liked it the red way and you changed the image in a way that the artist wouldn’t like.
Mikaeri said:
Something like post #2684763 is completely fine for me, […]
Eh, that’s quite a lot of magic that happened there...
Sorry for rambling a bit in the middle. Hopefully, it’s at least a bit helpful.