The Voynich Ninja

Hi all,

Just for fun, I decided to download a photo editing program and attempt to 'clean up' the rosettes page.  I carefully airbrushed out the dark lines and damaged caused by the folds in the vellum, and then did my best to redraw in any of the drawings and text which had been lost due to repeated folding of the page.

I'm a beginner at studying Voynich, but I'm even more of a newbie at photo editing so I'm sure most could do better.  And I fully recommend people to try it themselves!  The reason?  By zooming up very close to the document, and carefully removing imperfections, it forced me to scrutinize the page even more closely than I had done before, and I actually noticed a lot of things I hadn't picked up on before.

I've attached a scaled down image to show my attempts.  If anyone would like a full-page large size copy of the image, I'm happy to send one across, but with enough time and patience, I'm confident my own attempts could be far surpassed!

PS, as the image is still quite large, the image attached doesn't show up fully in the post.. you have to right-click and go to "show image" to see the full page... sorry!

PPS... is it sacrilegious to mess around with the document images like this?!?

G.

Hi Klingmann,
You've done a very nice job here. I had a go at doing a similar thing but didn't do it well as you have.

Like you say, you notice more when you're zoomed in trying to clean it up.
Until I tried i had never really noticed the 2 diagonally opposing suns( top-left, bottom right )
and the amount of stuff that surrounds the sphere on the top-right.

(06-02-2021, 12:34 AM)RobGea Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi Klingmann,
You've done a very nice job here. I had a go at doing a similar thing but didn't do it well as you have.

Like you say, you notice more when you're zoomed in trying to clean it up.
Until I tried i had never really noticed the 2 diagonally opposing suns( top-left, bottom right )
and the amount of stuff that surrounds the sphere on the top-right.

I have spent a lot of time studying this page and I would say that when one looks closely at it there is a huge level of specific detail. For example most or many of the small buildings are drawn each in it's own specific way, not as generic buildings. There are so many other specific details all over the page, someone might argue that the specific details are imaginative stylised details and have no real world meaning, but I am inclined to view the author as purposeful and that most of these details mean something.

Hi Klingmann,
Thank you for sharing this! I don't think it's "sacrilegious" at all to do this.
Several people have edited pages of the Voynich to see what they would look like, not just without the wear and tear but even with certain elements removed.
For example, one of the more common ones is where people have tried removing paint from illustrations to try to get a clearer idea of the underlying lines of the drawing, such as in Q13 to see under the blue water.
Nick Pelling has digitally altered several illustrations on his blog to remove lines he thinks may have been added later due to ink color discrepancies.
I know that some people disagree with this approach (I remember Adam McLean getting pretty upset about it) but overall I think it's fine as long as it is seen as an experiment and that we keep in mind that we could have unknowingly erased something significant and that we never lose sight of the original manuscript, warts and all.

Klingmann, you may not have seen this thread:

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I picked it up again more recently, but it is one of many things that has to wait till I have more time.

So I second (third....) the thought that image processing is a useful and not sacrilegious thing.