Learning as we go

My staff and I have scanned thousands of old Kerrville and Kerr County images, and I recently revisited some of the scans we produced in our early days of building this digital library, just to see if we've improved.  I'll let you be the judge with this old image of Water Street, taken in the 800 block, looking west toward the Weston Building and Schreiner Company. The photographer was about where One Schreiner Center is today.

Click on any image to enlarge

800 Block of Water, looking toward the Weston Building
and the Charles Schreiner Company, probably around 1885.

 What I noticed in looking at the above photo: it's all pretty flat, with no variance from the darkest parts to the lightest parts; the camera distorted the image to some degree; the building on the far right is fairly square against the edge of the photo, but the Weston building and Schreiner's seem to be tilting clockwise.

Same image, adjusted using Adobe Photoshop.

In this image, the view has been tilted somewhat in a counter-clockwise direction, and skewed to make the vertical lines true; contrast has been corrected, and the empty sky (and some of the mud of the street) has been cropped.

I think the bottom one looks better and offers more information.  What do you think?