I worked with several imaging and computer vision people at the rijksmuseum, including authors of this project. This team is actually extremely competent and professional. Usually surprising for governmental institutions, but this one is ace.
Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
131–140 of 153 posts
Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
#132Earlier 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.
This stood out to me the very first time I saw Starry Night at MoMa. The paint is so thickly layered, and you can see the individual brush strokes in stark relief.
Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Nights Watch takes up nearly an entire wall, not sure what you saw but it wasn't the actual painting.
Not only does it take up the entire wall, IIRC part of it was actually cut in order for it to fit that wall.
The sides were cut to fit a place in the old city hall (now palace) on Dam square in 1715.
Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
#134Earlier 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…
And famous art that's much smaller in person than I expected: The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai. For such an epic image, it's only 25x37 cm / 10x14".
Japanese woodblock prints were not considered art at the time, they were for the day to day. From advertisment to low cost decoration. Japanese Woodblock prints do not really have an original other than the woodblocks themselves (or the original painting the wood was carved from).
Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
#135> 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 camera+lens set up to 5 micron/pixel will have a shallow depth of field.
I looked up some numbers: The pixels of the camera are 4.6um, so the likely used a 1:1 makro lens (likely the HC 4/120mm). You will capture a 53x40mm region at once. The working distance for this lens goes down to 40cm for 1:1 magnification (might have been 40-45cm). Aperture 4 (as little diffraction as possible)
If we put that in a calculator, depth of field is only 240um. This is the working range where the object needs to be to be in focus.
I'm surprised the painting is that flat over a single image. Even a high spot on the canvas or an extra dab of paint will be higher. Maybe they took multiple images and focus stacked them?
Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
#136A 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 :)
Technically it is an interesting project. But anyone who has visited the museum will find it weird. It is very different. The building architecture is very different, there are thousands more works in the exposition, and the order of the works is very different, ...
I've visited the museum many times and I find it to be excellent!
Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
#137Using artificial intelligence
No thanks
Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
#138I 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…
well now most people look at pictures of stuff rich ppl on their phones all day. maybe they were ahead of their time :D. wish there were old masters who made pictures of cats. id visit that museum for sure.
Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
And famous art that's much smaller in person than I expected: The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai. For such an epic image, it's only 25x37 cm / 10x14".
It’s carved wood — hard to scale up!
Maximilian I's 9ft x 11ft Triumphal Arch would like a word with you:
Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
#140I’ve built a website which will show you a random object from the massive Rijksmuseum collection. Always nice to find something you’ve never seen before!