You know that picture of your children you’ve carried in that wallet in your hip pocket until it’s grown
creased and frayed and torn? Run it through a scanner. That divides the photo into millions of micro-
scopic areas and assigns each of them numbers representing color, brightness, and hue—something
for an image editor to work with. The editor attacks those ravages caused by ever relentless time and
your ever expanding butt. Some editors are smart enough that you don’t even have to point out
what’s wrong. They calculate which numbers seem out of place with those surrounding them. It
changes the misfit numbers to something similar to their neighbors. You may have to tell the editor
that the picture’s faded and discolored, but it’s not a hard job at all for the editor to add to some
numbers here and subtract from some numbers there until the color is nicely balanced. The final
result, a completely restored photo, surpasses most airbrushing jobs that were a restorer’s main attack
against aging before arithmetic joined the army.
Math is essential to creativity in the world today. That gets overlooked when a lot of people talk
about multimedia and computers. The babble usually goes that audio and video have added so
much to the computing experience, but it’s really the other way around. By overlaying music, shape,
color, and a range of other human experiences with a digital, numerical framework, computers have
expanded what can be done with art, science, music, writing, and communications. The ability to tin-
ker and toy with a digital photograph endlessly after it has been taken is the answer to Ansel
Adams’s complaint that not enough time and effort go into photographs. One can now work in front
of a computer as earnestly as Adams did in the darkroom to perfect an image that was caught on a
negative, as only a starting point.
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