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The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light

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Re: The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light

#22

I'm color-blind and I see absolutely no differences between the original and the modified images. So I assume this is working.

I'm not color-blind and I must say modified images look more realistic to me (e.g. normal skin color instead of sick-person greenish). Overall colors are lighter to my eye as well.

Re: The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light

#23
van Gogh chose paints for their immediacy of color, sometimes without understanding the problems of hue shifting and degradation displayed by certain pigments. This causes a huge headache for curators and in many cases the changes are irreversible. For example his chrome yellows contain sulphides which have significantly darkened and browned through exposure to UV. He also used various red lakes that are prone to fading and discoloration.

van Gogh famously wrote in a letter to his brother Theo: "Paintings fade like flowers... All the colors that impressionism has brought into fashion are unstable, so there is all the more reason to simply use them too brightly - time will tone them down only too much".

Any theory of color vision deficiency that attempts to reconstruct the color balances that van Gogh actually saw should take into account the hue/value/chroma of his paints such as they possessed when originally applied, and also consider that van Gogh intentionally adjusted his aesthetic to render color schemes in expectation of future pigment degradation, and that these adjustments cannot have been an exact science.

Re: The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light

#24
post #5
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concur wholeheartedly. Van Gogh's unusual color choices are a feature, not a bug. The author asserts that the muted color pallet for 'The Harvest' imbues the painting with an autumnal glow. For me, it removes the element of the painting that I find most interesting. The other comparisons fall along similar lines. Of course, this is art, and it's not truly possible for either of us to be 'wrong'. Taking a new perspect…

Yes, I think it would be quite interesting to have a museum exhibition where a high quality print of a original Van Gogh is displayed next a high quality print of the filtered version. I would defiantly pay to see that I wonder if any other famous artists saw their work differently than the rest of us?

> I wonder if any other famous artists saw their work differently than the rest of us?

Ludwig van Beethoven's hearing started to deteriorate early on and eventually he became completely deaf though he continued to compose.

Of course there has to be a substantial difference between losing a sense or never to have had it but we don't know whether Van Gogh's altered vision was there from birth or the alteration happened later in his life.

I agree with both of you, most of the pictures lose a lot of character and uniqueness in the "corrected" versions; though one or two of them gain an incredibly realistic feeling of ambiance.

Better or not? Shouldn't even be the question - but it is an interesting theory and result!

Re: The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light

#25
post #21

Whether it adds any thing to the article but Van Gogh was on drugs with the known side effect of mucking with your yellow and green perception. He is specifically mentioned in this article on adverse wise effects of digoxin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digoxin#Adverse_effects

Interesting, as there does seem to be a consistently stronger vibrance of yellow monochromatic hues in the protanomal paintings.

Re: The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light

#26
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A color blind person does not perceive colors dimmer or lighter, but perceives them wrong. So for example, Van Gogh would see a wheat field and pick a color that matched the wheat to paint it, according to what he saw. Turns out that this color would be orange, because to him orange and wheat both looked the same. As a color blind myself, I see absolutely no difference between the original and the modified images. Th…

Even The Harvest was the same for you? That one I could see a large difference. The rest were more or less the same for me though.

Looking closely at the Harvest I see that that the field is different indeed. Orange in the original, and "wheat" on the modified. But that wasn't immediately apparent at first.

Re: The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light

#27
In programs like Photoshop you can preview your design using color blindness filters (View > Proof Setup > Color Blindness). Another trick is to grayscale your design to check the contrast. This will help a lot to create a design that is also accessible for colorblind people.

Contrast is the key here. Red for example is a very dark color. That's why they use to print secret documents on red paper. When you would copy such document with a copier it would become completely black.

Re: The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light

#29
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even The Harvest was the same for you? That one I could see a large difference. The rest were more or less the same for me though.

Looking closely at the Harvest I see that that the field is different indeed. Orange in the original, and "wheat" on the modified. But that wasn't immediately apparent at first.

The Harvest is different from the others, the wheat goes from intense orange to yellow. All others are about green being replaced with yellow.

Re: The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light

#30
I'm colour-blind (red-green) and have, since I can remember, always had a huge affinity for the paintings of Van Gogh. I didn't realise that other people considered his paintings to be unusually toned or that he may have been colour-blind, so I found this article fascinating.
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