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I am literally standing in the museum, looking at night watch as this moment, and saw this post. Legend.
I got to watch them do some of the scanning when I walked through the museum on a trip a couple years ago. Very cool setup.
I worked at this museum a few decades ago on a contract job, it was cool to walk around among so much history. Though I never really could appreciate the "old masters" from the Dutch Golden Age. Their work was part art and part record-keeping for which nowadays we have photography and video. The subject of many of these works are stuffy rich people posing for the "family album". Artfully done yes but boring subjects…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One of the things special to me about the night watch is that it's huge in real life which I never really appreciated before I saw it. Famous art that's stunningly bigger in person than I expected: - The Raft of the Medusa (Géricault) - Guernica (Picasso) - The Hallucinogenic Toreador (Dalí) Cannot recommend seeing art in person enough. Aside from the scale, it's also impossible to fully capture color or translucen…
Aside from color and translucency, an original artwork shows also the relief. It can tell much about the creation process of a painting and adds additional texture. Furthermore, some pigments were expensive and hard to work with prior to the 19th century such that artists used it very sparingly.
Oh wow, that is so cool. I thought I was at max zoom, normal blurry tiles. Then BOOM! It came into focus and I saw tiny cracks, smallest areas of paint, no loss of clarity. It's like you're standing right up next to it. That's incredible! Wow, all I can say. That's insane, that is totally insane! I would love if there were a depthmask or something and a synthetic "keylight" feature you could drag around to really get…
> an error of even 1/8 mm in the placement of the camera would result in a useless image. That doesn’t make sense to me. Presumably part of the image stitching process is aligning the images to each other based on the areas they overlap, so why do they need that much precision in the camera placement? I’d think keeping the camera square to the painting would be important to minimize needing to skew the images, but th…
A colleague of mine made this very nice way to explore the (often) high resolution images from their collection: https://rijkscollection.net/ Highly recommended and easy to fall into a “rijkscollection hole” for a bit :)