Interlaken Rpp ... Retouched?

Interlaken RPP ... ReTouched?

Magnification led only to scattered pixelation, so I am confident that this postcard is either an RPP or one of PhotoGlob's "delicate monotone photogravure" products. Someday, maybe I'll even know how to tell those two processes apart from factors internal to the image ... or, not ;)

Meanwhile, take a gander at that large building (?hotel) up the hill from the city. It seems to me that the granularity & exposure & contrast in the image of that one building, and of its trees, is very different than that of the other buildings & trees.

Ditto, the sun/shadow angles on this building seem to differ from those of the rest of the town, but these can be very hard to learn from reliably.

Q/ Has that building been added to an older image? It might have made sense (economically, practically) to add the building to an existing photogravure plate rather than start from scratch. OTOH, there are similar optical oddities in other parts of the image, so maybe there is some other explanation?

(For the image of the entire postcard, I set the [sharpen] image processing function to [0], so as to finesse speculation about artifacts. However, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Bobby for restoring these functions, which I have sorely missed.)

I searched hundreds of photos without managing to identify this building. Of course, any 'early' remodeling might mean that it only looked like this for a fairly short period of time. I suspect that one might have more success identifying this building from old maps of the town rather than from old photos of individual buildings.

Where is nigelc, now that I need him?

If you are inclined (and easily amused), the tall ?cupola in the center of the image (clearly marked "VICTORIA") seems to belong to what is today known as the Victoria-Jungfrau Grand Hotel & Spa ( https://www.victoria-jungfrau.ch/ ) and, in the right foreground, you can see the sign on the old Hotel Metropole ( http://www.metropole-interlaken.ch/ ) that stood from 1904 until it was torn-down & replaced post-WW2.

You can read more about the publisher, Photo-Glob of Zurich, at:

http://www.metropostcard.com/publishersp2.html ... first listing

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Fascinating. It does look as if the building had been inserted, like those stickers children put (in the wrong place, inevitably) in picture books. Makes a change from airbrushing Trotsky, I suppose! Also interesting that you couldn't find it in other photos. And that you searched!

I think it's Hotel Berghof Amaranth, and it's really there. Photo might have been re-touched, but other images I've seen have that same building right there.

This sure looks like it's a close up of the hotel shown in the original postcard (at least most all of the structural features seem to match). This hotel was said to be built in 1894:

I was not long on this forum before I figured-out the '1' in 'wt1'.

Now I know that the 'w' stands for 'wizard'.

The granularity has to do with the fact that the hotel is father away from the camera than the rest of the city, and therefore not in the field of focus. This alone is clear and convincing evidence it is an RPP.

Hi IkeyPikey and wt1,

Thanks for posting these cards.

This is indeed the Hotel Regina. It still stands there today but I believe it has become some kind of residential centre rather than a public hotel.

I know this view well and have just booked a two-week holiday in Interlaken for next summer.

The old Metropole Hotel appears to have been very elegant but was long gone when I first visited the town in the early 1980s. The new hotel in its place has fantastic views from its very pleasant tearoom but for me it's completely out of place.

I wonder if the black dot on the skyline on the Jungfraujoch has been added to bring this out.

Many of the Swiss postcard cards of this period did have figures of people added to them, often with the same figures used over and over again in different scenes. I'll see if I can find some and post them here.

Thanks again.

Those areas must look beautiful to visit in real life.

In fact, it is the presence of two fields-of-focus - one for the town, and one for the Hotel Regina - that led me to think that the Regina had been added at a later date.

It is very difficult to understand how those two parts of the image could be so crisp'n'clear, and the forest between them (and aside the Regina) could be, at the same time, so gently out-of-focus.

I may be misusing 'granularity'; I meant it as 'revealing small detail', eg, the opposite of 'grainy'.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey