Image processing, highlighting hidden details

[Bernd]

It's not as good as my spray plaster wall for induced pareidolia.

I am not seeing anything deliberately human-made in the corner of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. either.

In my experience, a good method for such comparisons is to create a layered file with the original image as background and the processed image as overlay, then fiddle with transparency back and forth. A n animated .gif or .png blinking between original and processed image can also be useful for display.

[RobGea]

Poor mans image processing.
1. Reduce nbr of colors to 256 or 16.
2. Replace those colors with random colors.
3. Kick back with a cigar, a crystal tumbler of absinthe and enjoy !

       

[Moonchild]

Looking at, for example, f75r, one can see parts of the image of f75v, but below the pool there seem to be structures that do not match the other side. We do not know what used to be on the page before f75.

The things that stood out for me the most on these images you provided are the straight lines in some areas. They are very visible on there..

[ReneZ]

I'm sorry that I have been too brief (as so often), leading to confusion.
In my plots, the bottom right corner of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. shows nothing, and that is not the area I meant.

The area I meant is below the central pool, but still above the bottom pool on the other side (f75v).

Just to clarify what I am saying: this process brings up structures, and many of these are already (partly) visible in the original image:
- folds and blemishes
- shine-through from whatever is on the other side of the same folio.
- In some cases also print-off from the opposing folio

Others are not so easily identified. The area below the central pool is just the very first example.
I am not saying that there's a face or a cloud bunny. Just that it is similar in style as some of the shine through.

On the same page (f75r) at the height of the central pool, one can see the elongated horizontal pool from f75v.
Also, on f75v, the entire structure in the top half of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. dominates the image.

[ReneZ]

Poor mans image processing.
1. Reduce nbr of colors to 256 or 16.
2. Replace those colors with random colors.
3. Kick back with a cigar, a crystal tumbler of absinthe and enjoy !

When going from 8 bits colour depth to 4 bits, you could in principle pick any combination of 4 bits.
I am guessing that you picked the four highest...

Have you tried any of the others?

[ReneZ]

The easier exercise is to just colour code (stretch) the ink colours. This highlights (among other things like illumination or the state of the parchment) any changes in ink. I show two obvious cases on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

It strongly suggests that the marginal stars were drawn as the text was written.
While that isn't exactly a shocking discovery, I find it interesting nonetheless, because in one case, on folio 108 verso, the marginal stars have been added to (what looks like) a long paragraph, not the usual short ones in quire 20.
A similar long paragraph on folio 116 recto does not have the marginal stars.

[Koen G]

That is pretty interesting. It also shows that text and "images" are contemporaneous in this case, i.e. the person who drew the stars was also writing Voynichese at the same time.

[pjburkshire]

Since I believe that the star images in the earlier parts of the manuscript represent souls, I have toyed with the idea that the stars in Quire 20 may be for deceased members of their organization. To my untrained eye, it looks like the text was written as a whole. That is, not names added as needed. So, if this is the case, unless they had some truly horrible mass casualty incident, I would say that would indicate that the surviving manuscript is a copy of an earlier manuscript.

[MarcoP]

These experiments look very interesting. The accurate separation of ink from background is a great step forward!

I am intrigued by the image of f104v. For instance, what happened at the fifth star? It seems that the scribe wrote the first two words and then "took a break". If he just ran out of ink, it is strange he did not notice when he ended the previous paragraph. Maybe he wrote those two words as a reminder for what he was going to write the next day? This would imply that the text is meaningful and that it was not copied from a pre-existing text; but of course I am just wildly speculating about the position of that "ink break" and one can imagine many possible situations...

   

[pjburkshire]

Just because the ink changed that does not mean the scribe took a break from writing. Maybe the first bottle of ink ran out and he immediately started using a new second bottle. I don't see any issue with the text that would indicate that there was a serious problem with the quill. The first part is a little tiny bit thicker than the second part so maybe he did change to a different quill or this could just be my imagination.