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In practice yes, Museums occasionally clean & restore their paintings which shifts the color balance, grain, texture similar ways. There's a some great pre/pos

In practice yes, Museums occasionally clean & restore their paintings which shifts the color balance, grain, texture similar ways. There's a some great pre/post conservation photo in this article: http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/as-layers-of-old-varnish-are-removed-italian-renaissance-painter-ercole-de-robertis-brilliance-is-once-again-revealed/ http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/as-layers-of-old-varnish-are-rem...

rglullis 5y ago
IIUIC, the restorers are not changing the original but merely restoring the degradation that the works of art suffer. The paintings are 600 years old, you'd figure that the colors would be a lot more vibrant when it was painted than in the "pre-restoration" state. Digital art does not have this problem.
- LordDragonfang 5y ago
  >Digital art does not have this problem. https://xkcd.com/1683/ https://xkcd.com/1683/ On a less smug note, truly digital art might not have that problem, but digital representations of analogue art (which the topic of discussion falls under) do. Most movies are just digital encodings of analogue film, and it's only very recently this stopped being true. And that's not to mention the fact that the way you that you view digital files also affects them. There's the general trend towards denser displays requiring higher resolutions for a file to appear crisp, but even the screen technology itself is a factor - take a look at how much different pixel sprites look on modern displays compared to the CRTs they were designed for:[1][2] [1] https://twitter.com/crtpixels https://twitter.com/crtpixels [2] https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-case-for-composite.html https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-case-for-co...
- spiffytech 5y ago
  A Vermeer painting was recently restored, and it went beyond the normal "make it look brand new": restorers removed paint layers that we've learned were someone painting over a part of Vermeer's original work to hide it. The painting now on display shows something markedly different from how centuries of viewers have seen it. https://hyperallergic.com/672345/vermeer-restoration-finally-complete-reveals-a-painting-within-a-painting/ https://hyperallergic.com/672345/vermeer-restoration-finally...

rglullis 5y ago

IIUIC, the restorers are not changing the original but merely restoring the degradation that the works of art suffer. The paintings are 600 years old, you'd figure that the colors would be a lot more vibrant when it was painted than in the "pre-restoration" state. Digital art does not have this problem.

LordDragonfang 5y ago
>Digital art does not have this problem. https://xkcd.com/1683/ https://xkcd.com/1683/ On a less smug note, truly digital art might not have that problem, but digital representations of analogue art (which the topic of discussion falls under) do. Most movies are just digital encodings of analogue film, and it's only very recently this stopped being true. And that's not to mention the fact that the way you that you view digital files also affects them. There's the general trend towards denser displays requiring higher resolutions for a file to appear crisp, but even the screen technology itself is a factor - take a look at how much different pixel sprites look on modern displays compared to the CRTs they were designed for:[1][2] [1] https://twitter.com/crtpixels https://twitter.com/crtpixels [2] https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-case-for-composite.html https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-case-for-co...
spiffytech 5y ago
A Vermeer painting was recently restored, and it went beyond the normal "make it look brand new": restorers removed paint layers that we've learned were someone painting over a part of Vermeer's original work to hide it. The painting now on display shows something markedly different from how centuries of viewers have seen it. https://hyperallergic.com/672345/vermeer-restoration-finally-complete-reveals-a-painting-within-a-painting/ https://hyperallergic.com/672345/vermeer-restoration-finally...