Masterpieces Online — High Culture At High Resolution

crimeandpunishment writes "You can now see the finest details of some of the finest Italian masterpieces with just one click of your mouse. High-resolution images of classic paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio, and Botticelli are now online with that opportunity. You can zoom in to the smallest details, even ones you wouldn't see when viewing the paintings in person at a museum. The images have a resolution of up to 28 billion pixels, which is about 3,000 times more than a photo from an average digital camera."

Comments

I Don't See ...

[WrongSizeGlass]

I think they missed one. I don't see Dogs Playing Poker. I'm just sayin' ...

Re:I Don't See ...

[hedwards]

Not really, it would be better than what we currently have, but prints are barely better than nothing. You can't reproduce with pixels what was created with pigments, it just doesn't work. You cannot currently create an image on a monitor that uses brown. No combination of RBG values will give you brown. You're also not going to be able to appreciate the effect of translucent glazing or the brushwork. Not to mention the monitor calibration and control of the lighting conditions.

For somebody with no or little knowledge of art, it would be sufficient, but it's really a pale shade of the real thing.

Re:I Don't See ...

[Reziac]

The other day I found myself ranting to a friend on that very subject. I'd never really been interested in 1600s-era art based on prints. Once I saw some with my own eyes -- wow, the difference defies description. NO print ever shows even a hint of the depth, glow, and sense of its own reality that you get from seeing these works in person.

I see we've killed their server so I'll have to wait on seeing what this effort looks like. However, I'm of the opinion that any access is better than NO access (since most of us cannot travel to see all these works in person).

And as to brown on a monitor... the nearest you can come is actually a sort of grubby purple that fools the eye if you don't look too closely, or lack real brown to compare to. Very irritating (especially when trying to get it visually-right for a client's logo -- all in BROWN!)

Re:I Don't See ...

[bertok]

I did get it to where it looks good, but it took a lot of swearing. And I'd started with a scan of the original (best copy available -- it was an existing print logo to be used on their website). Had to do a lot of finagling with the tint to get it to where what the eye *sees* on a monitor is the intended shade of brown. On examining it at the pixel level, the reason became clear -- there ain't no such shade as 'brown' in the CRT spectrum.

There's no such shade as "brown" on the real spectrum. As a graphics designer, I thought you'd understand that.

Every color other than red, green, or blue will always be a mixture on all monitors at the "pixel" level. Your monitor isn't somehow lying to you, or cheating you out of a real color, it's mixing colors using additive blending, just like it happens in with light in real life as well.

If it looks the "same" at a distance, than for all practical purposes, it is the same. Putting your nose up to the glass and claiming that it's all "pixelated" - and hence somehow fake - is just stupid.

For professional work, why don't you get a wide-gamut monitor like the some of the new Dell monitors? They have a narrower color gamut than the human eye, but wider than sRGB, Adobe RGB, and CMYK.

And unlike your stone-age CRT, an LCD doesn't flicker, has a higher resolution, the pixels are perfectly square, the edge looks just as perfect as the center, and their color calibration drifts less with time. And if you get a matching video card, you can also get 30-bit color (10+10+10), which gives you 1024 shades of each color channel instead of the usual 256. It makes a significant difference when editing images with a lot of shadow detail.

Re:I Don't See ...

[Reziac]

Yeah, I know there's no such colour as... [insert combo-of-whatevers here] ...but it's still a convenient shorthand for what we SEE. Imagine if these what-we-see colours had no names and you had to refer to each by its numbers!

As to examining pixels, that's what I wound up doing because the initial brown looked wrong (like it wanted to be a bruised purple instead). There's nothing stupid about taking something down to its component parts to see why it's not working.

I've seen exactly *one* LCD that I deemed entirely suitable, and the damned thing cost $2200 (and that was at the trade-show discount). A wee ways out of my budget, probably for the next century. -- One of the issues that drives me nuts is that they're sensitive to viewing angle. Not so much from side-to-side anymore but still from up-to-down. So if you don't always slouch at the same height, the image changes. The very expensive one lacked this visual defect.

And as you note there's the issue of matching the video card to the LCD, notably the resolution. Not an issue with a CRT. I really hate being stuck on someone else's notion of MY ideal resolution, because otherwise the aspect ratio is munged, or it displays interlaced (I've seen both problems).

I've also found the average LCD's total light output wearing on my eyes.

I suppose if I was made of money, or doing graphics as a fulltime job, it would be worth whatever investment was required to get it how I want it. As it is, my stone-age solution works better for me, for a fraction of the investment.

Links to the actual images...

[iammani]

Caravaggio, Bacchus
Botticelli, The Birth of Venus
Sandro Botticelli, La Primavera

Re:Links to the actual images...

[Trufagus]

The link in the summary goes to a page at 'skunkpost' that merely reprints an AP article.

I don't care about skunkpost or AP, but if it is AP's article then the link should go to the original. Otherwise we will get sites simply reprinting other people's articles and then submitting their reprint to /. etc.

I realize this problem is as old as the Internet (probably much older) but it would be SO EASY for /. to stop contributing to the problem.

Re:Another cool site

[Andy Smith]

Link is goatse.

I feel poorly.

Re:Yawn...

[dkleinsc]

That's not why I'd even consider going to an art museum. After all, since a lot of those folks don't even allow you to take photographs, if you just want to say you've been, you can just lie about it.

No, go to an art museum because you might see something interesting, unique, beautiful, or mind-bending. I'm not even very visual myself, but a good art museum's works will draw your eyes right in and convince you to spend a while exploring the details.

Re:and who said that 10Mpix is more than enough?

[BrokenHalo]

You only need more pixels when you need a larger image and you need to be closer than what the current number allows.

Of course, in a sense, nothing has changed here: back in the day when we all used cellulose film, we all knew that if we wanted an image that needed blowing up to a large size, we needed a larger-format negative. We used to swear by the 6x6 cm "medium" format (e.g. from Hasselblad or Rolleiflex) for quick work, but if we wanted really crisp resolution, we used 5x4" or sometimes 8x10" plates.

Although I occasionally miss the discipline of black-and-white (always with Ilford film), there's only one thing that has really disappointed me with the move to digital photography: the apparent failure of print media to approximate the luminous colour and definition of Cibachrome (now, I believe, known as Ilfochrome) colour prints created from positive transparencies. Many years ago, I used to do this myself, but now I don't even have a darkroom...

Re:Another cool site

[Andy Smith]

Well done to whoever marked this as troll. I was trying to be a whiny bitch!