SearkeA short write up on how I performed a cleanup of this beautiful stamp. Because it encompasses a lot of about what I think about when it comes to images and art and practice.
I'm using Mathematica for most of this work. And what the code below illustrates for me is how important the UI is. Colors and Images are first class objects that we can manipulate both programmatically and in a manual style. It's possible to mix and develop both kinds of workflows together. In this case I'm getting the major colors to get a rough mask of the black stain.
Mathematica is built from the ground up for kind of messy work between formal programming and informal hand exploration. In this case, I've created a UI on the fly to adjust a parameter of an image process algorithm to detect the black stain.