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 :)
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, ...
Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
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Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
#142I 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…
That's actully what I like about the Night Watch, and how it's displayed. It's in a room with other paintings from the same period in the same genre (group portraits of guilds or militia units), so you can see what Rembrandt's clients were expecting and how the Night Watch is different.
Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
#143"The Shooting Company Of Captain Frans B. Cocq" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVlSARPr9Y0
Funny coincidence - only this morning I watched a documentary about how they used machine learning to reconstruct the destroyed parts of the painting.
Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
#144For anyone interested in technical aspects of this, I recommend watching Pycon talk [1] from Robert Erdmann. I bookmarked this couple of years ago. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_hm5oX7ZlE
He was already getting into this kind of art spectroscopy at the time, and the things he'd showed us at the time that they'd already discovered were wild. IIRC, they had laid out many Rembrandts on the same large "scroll" of canvas, identified where they were painted relative to one another on the scroll, and even identified some paintings of unclear authorship by thing them to that same scroll.
It was not at all surprising to see him move to Amsterdam and keep working with the Rijksmuseum. I smile every time I see this work pop up.
Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
#145Oh 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…
Another similar scan is the Ghent altarpiece[0], and you get to compare the pieces before and after a restoration. [0] https://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be/ghentaltarpiece/#home
Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, ...
What is weird about it? That it isn't exactly like the real museum?
Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
The map or whatever they use to achieve the online widget is extremely impressive. I’ve never seen such a clean implementation of a progressively loading zoom tool like that before, apart from in map applications and even they often suffer from buffering.
Now if it would just support mousewheel zooming... Thats my only problem with the viewer.
Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another similar scan is the Ghent altarpiece[0], and you get to compare the pieces before and after a restoration. [0] https://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be/ghentaltarpiece/#home
I wonder why did they change the lamb's head features, it looks worse (the expression) after the restoration IMO and such a significant alteration is not acceptable IMO.
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200201-is-this-the-fir...
Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
#149Those 100MP digital medium format cameras are the most exciting tech in photography of the whole 21st century as far as I’m concerned. For my “serious” photography work I shoot medium/large format film, and every digital camera has left me non plussed. I may be a little obsessive about image quality, but what’s the point of dropping $5k on a setup that gives worse results than a wooden box and a sheet of film? Then I…
There’s a trade off between sharpness and noise, the GFX have an intentionally lowered fill factor to, essentially, produce a sharper image. Meanwhile noise is one of the most important things when marketing mainstream cameras (next to AF), so they go for gapless microlenses etc. The reason this impacts sharpness is because a lower FF gets you closer to Shannon’s ideal point sample, while a 99% FF is like a pitch-siz…
Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)
#150The Rijksmuseum is on my top 5 list of museums I've ever visited, along with the Vatican Museum, the Louvre, the Met and the Uffizzi. There are a lot more interesting works in there including Vermeer, other Rembrandt works, Pieter DeHooch, Rubens, the whole golden era of Dutch Renaissance... Since you're in Amsterdam already save some time to visit the VanGogh Museum, very close to Rijksmuseum. And since you're in Ne…