PhilipPeake

Another vote for one bit images. I don't like having to fire up my old Photoshop just to do this.

I initially saw "Alise" too. But that isn't a particularly English name, particularly 18th century name. The Mainwarings are were pervasive in that part of the country that I think people see/saw that by default. Capitalization of the word "Housemaid" doesn't seem right. The rest of the writing has correct capitalization. Really, it has to be a proper noun for capitalization, and the handwriting suggests someone that knows English. This is a university. I have suggested pulling the piece of skirting board off again and spending a couple of days with it in the physics dept.

Thanks for that. I think its about as good as we are going to get from that photo. Never thought of the burn tool.... but did try different blend modes. The third line is probably Alice Mainwaring, they were/are a fairly well known family in the area. The last word doesn't make much sense ... unless its "Housemaid", which it could be. The last name is Sarah Salmon. A few people have seen the date as 1st of April -- that was what I first saw. I can't make any sense at all of the second line even now that I can see it :-)

During some repairs to an old hall, part of the skirting board was removed and one of the workmen noticed an inscription. He took a photo with his iPhone 6 before replacing it. The photo isn't bad, but of course its not a RAW photo taken with a good camera, so extracting detail from the jpeg is non trivial. I have used a few filter layers etc. to try to make the inscription more legible, but not really improved much on the original photo. Any ideas of methods of attack here would be appreciated. Attached is the original photo and my best attempt at clarifying the writing. What I see looks like: Signed on the 1st (?) of April 1887 by(?) of ???? & of ???? Alice Mainwaring ??????? & Sarah Salmon Some means of filtering out the horizontal wood grain might help?

I read today that Lightroom Classic (perpetual license, not cloud based) will receive no updates after the end of 2017. I refuse to adopt their cloud model. My last version of Photoshop sits pretty much unused, and I can see Lightroom going the same way.