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Make old stonecarvings/paintings (1500 years old) visable again


H

History photographer

Guest
Hello!

I need help to make old carvings and paintings on this old stone visable again. The stone is around 1500 years old and it would be fantastic if we could make the carvings/paintings visable again after so man years. I suppose using layers or the right type of filters, increase sharpness and saturation is the way to go. You can read more on my blog and there you can download a tif-picture of the stone to work with. Good luck!!

This is a link to the picture in tif-format (38 mb).
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8235213/Mysterystone.tif

Best regards
History photographer
 
38mb is usually too big for most here to contemplate downloading.
 
Ahhh....... You want a new picture of an old picture, re-pictured to fit a picture that is missing part of the picture.............. I can't picture it :rolleyes::bustagut:
 
ZOOM in looks like a puppy in mu circled area plus the two lines?

puppy.jpg
 
IK Paul, that's the only thing i could identify. Besides, why take a pic of a rock and cut off part of it? I'm not sure what we are supposed to think can be done here. So . . . HistoryPhotog?
 
I respect the fact that they had chiselled those straight lines into the rock, but considering the Egyptian pyramids, Mayan temples, Greek temples, the Roman Amphitheatre etc. had already been built by this date. It makes me wonder whether there were talented artists in that period, but all their work was ruined, so all that was left was the workings of yokels and bumpkins alike.

Maybe telling us what is so significant about this slab of history, as all it is to us, is an image. Unless you tell us why, what looks to be the drawings of a 3 year are so special, we won't respect the image enough to do any work on it.

Here's some cave art from 20X earlier!
 
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There is a relative large relevant literature on photographic techniques for obtaining good images of fossils, paleo-writing on stone (and other media), and forensic samples.

Unfortunately, conventional photoshop enhancement techniques are not going to take you as far as if you start right at the beginning of the process using techniques such as taking multiple images through a range of UV, IR, polarized light, and narrow-band visible light filters, as well as with sophisticated lighting techniques such as multiple grazing incidence lighting (see the 2nd reference below).

A few good first reads might be:
http://www.uv.es/~pardomv/pe/2000_1/fossils/text.pdf
http://palaeo-electronica.org/2002_1/fossils/fossil.pdf and
http://sprg.massey.ac.nz/ivcnz/Proceedings/IVCNZ_03.pdf

If you limit yourself to just photoshop-like enhancement techniques, do yourself a favor and obtain and learn how to use tools from the forensics community such as these tool sets:
http://www.oceansystems.com/forensic/forensic-Photoshop-Plugins/toolset.php
http://reindeergraphics.com/forensics.html


A program called, "color deconvolution" is particularly good if small spectral differences are present, but you don't have the skills, equipment or time to do it correctly, ie, at the time of image capture using narrow band optical filters:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6795661/4N6site/improc/decoplugin/main.htm


HTH,

Tom M

PS (added in edit): I forgot to mention the plugin for ImageJ that is designed specifically for rock art: http://www.dstretch.com/DStretchHelp.html

PS#2 (added in edit):

In all fairness, I should mention that in spite of the limitations of working only in Photoshop, a lot of people have pushed a Photoshop-only approach pretty far, e.g.:

http://www.rupestrian.com/Enhancement.pdf

http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/9871b9sc#page-1

http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/photography/30127-rock-art-how-photograph-2.html

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Digital+infra-red+photography+for+recording+painted+rock+art.-a0169923802

http://www.scahome.org/publications/proceedings/Proceedings.24Catacora.pdf
 
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Indeed Tom is da man, when it comes to in depth replies and image based knowledge, good on ya bud.
 
Thank you for all respons on this thread!

So what is special with this stone then? Well we don´t know that yet. But what we know is that the stone has signs of some kind of carvings. The stone is placed in the middle of an area in where you can find graves and stonecircles wich are 2500 to 950 years old. This stone is probably from 400-500 AD just before the Viking age (750 -1050 AD). This is a period with no written sources in Scandinavia and you don´t find many picturestones from this period at all in this area. The few that are known is from the island of Gotland in the Baltic sea. The stone is covered by moss and dirt so this is a real challenge, i know that. If we found something on the stone it´s probably symbols of the Norse mythology. Well I think this a worth a trie.....

I think the best way is that fresh eyes examine the stone and we together discuss what we see and come to a common conclusion. Otherwise it´s always an risk that "we see what we want to see" if you understand what i mean...
 
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Thank you for your work here! I have also identified the lines and circle. The most visible carvings are in the bottom middle of the stone and bottom right.
 
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stone.jpg

This is some intresting spots of the stone. The most visable carvings are in the bottom middle of the stone and bottom right. Zoom in and out with different magnification to get the best view of the structure.
 
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I consider myself to have a good eye (two actually) but for me this is nothing more than wishful thinking some would call it Pareidolia.
I hope you win your quest.
 
Yes, the risk of "you see what you want to see is obvious". That´s why thers a point that different people look att the strucutures and come with there own conclusion of what it is. But the discussion have to be openminded and critical at the same time, that´s the point with this thread.
 
I have inverted changed colours even applied depth to the image and to be honest i see nothing of any real quality, it might be the actual image supplied i don't know?
No offence either way.
 
Thank you for all the work you done! And maybe this is it. There is nothing special with the carvings (if there are some) on the stone.
 
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