[Other] Unpainted version of VMS

[oshfdk]

Do you know what kind of scan would be required to get the best contrast between ink and paint? Or to even reveal ink under the paint?

This is a very interesting question. I suppose, MSIs should be more than enough for this task, but doing MSIs of the whole codex is a complex and potentially harmful procedure, as far as I understand. 

Given that we have MSIs for a number of pages with ink and paint, it should be possible to take wavelength metadata from MSIs and compute which narrow band optical filter (of wavelengths that would work with a normal camera, not IR or UV) would produce the maximum separation between ink and everything else. Most likely it won't be useful for visual inspection, since narrowband filters are darkish, but modern camera sensors are very sensitive, so it should be possible to snap the filter onto a decent consumer-level camera and take a few pictures.

Note that I'm an amateur in this. I have used narrow band filters for non-professional photography, they do produce very cool effects, but for this task maybe there is a better professional solution. E.g., if there is a way to combine a few narrow band filters (via double exposure?) the result could be even better.

On the other hand, what is the value of identifying a new label or two under paint, if we have access to the whole corpus of text and no luck with deciphering it so far.