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Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

rijksmuseum.nl

141–150 of 153 posts

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#141
post #97

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, ...

What is weird about it? That it isn't exactly like the real museum?

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#142

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…

> 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 in my personal opinion.

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
Whenever I see this image, or read bout it, I instantly want to listen to the great song by Ayreon, inspired by it:

"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)

#144

For 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

I had the fortune of taking Erdmann's Python class at the University of Arizona 15 years ago --- a Python/Pylab/data engineering class aimed at materials science engineering students.

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)

#145

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…

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.

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#146

Earlier 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?

In the museum, I felt a dialogue between each painting with the surrounding ones. They'd be grouped stylistically, with painters from the same era, on similar themes. It was like a walk where we'd see a continuous. In the computer/site, it is much more discrete, sectioned, and compartmentalized.

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#147

Earlier 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.

The default viewer does have that. Rijksmuseum's website where this is implemented chose to disable it.

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#148
post #145

Earlier 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.

It actually seems like they restored it to its original style. It was painted over to make the sheep look more sheep-like. The "new" restored version is actually how the Van Eycks painted it.[0]

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200201-is-this-the-fir...

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#149
post #11

Those 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…

There is also a tradeoff between sharpness and aliasing, that's a bigger driver for microlenses than just capturing more photons. A point sample is only ideal if your sample resolution is above the nyquist frequency which for the real world it won't be.

Re: Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

#150

The 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…

The sad reality is that if one is _already_ in Amsterdam, he or she has to spend a week or two more there just to be able to get into the VanGogh Museum.
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