Thank you for taking the time to produce a version yourself and giving us your opinion of which image you consider to best fit your definition of having the Pho

Thank you for taking the time to produce a version yourself and giving us your opinion of which image you consider to best fit your definition of having the Photoshop je ne sais quoi and which does not. That is the direct a to b comparison I had hoped for. These images are no less impressive without a color balance provided by the editor. They are a journey through the former Russian empire and down the old Silk Road into a past made more accessible by color. Beyond any concerns of the trueness of their rendition, they are a readily comprehended document of a world long gone. These are relics in living color, their faces and fascades as ruddy as the day they were photographed. This is a far-flung agrarian empire and the ancestors of an antique world on the cusp of an upheaval. Whatever the realities of the world represented and the facts that fill in my poor command of history, this is a world that integrates itself squarely with our everyday world precisely because it is depicted in a familiar fashion. The commonplace monochrome images of the past are colder, more analytical, and more removed than these. So, aside from the interests of archivalists and historians who need to preserve artifacts as completely as they are found, who gives a damn if the use of Photoshop munged the color space a little and these images are dressed up a bit for eyes who've seen every color? The dressing doesn't alter the substance beneath, and if we are able to see past the process with a little help from the editor and into our imagination of this other world, all the better. In a more sober assessment, all of these colors in these scenes can be constructed from the world in which we live currently, the grass, the sky, the skin tones, the wood, the stone, the dye in the clothing. The lighting conditions can be replicated for the same time of year, day and weather conditions. All of these sites exist in the world, however excavated or built up. Clothing can be sewn and dyed, models found and dressed. Only then may we know if what we've seen here isn't a very slight fabrication by the editor. Or we may be assured that what we've seen is good enough and close enough that we had wrung out from it the last drop of evidence of the human condition, and let it rest.