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717 Gigapixel Image of Rembrandt's Nightwatch
- malkia 5y agoI wanna see the street view here :) - https://hyper-resolution.org/view.html?pointer=0.393,0.002&r=0.3405,0.3497,0.0078,0.0039&i=Rijksmuseum/SK-C-5/SK-C-5_VIS_5-um_2020-09-08 https://hyper-resolution.org/view.html?pointer=0.393,0.002&r... Such good detail! Wow!
- erwincoumans 5y agoWow, that is an amazing resolution. It would be interesting to create such image every year, and see the changes over time (if any).
- margalabargala 5y agoVery interesting to zoom all the way in and note that some of the pigments had a tendency to crack as they dried, and others did not. I imagine the paints were selected intentionally with this in mind, as the cracking where it exists seems to enhance the painting more than take away (dark background, hats, etc) while lighter colors that should not be cracked, are indeed less so (skin, armor).
- zamadatix 5y agoSounds a bit like reading too far into it without actual evidence this was the intent. Could just be the way the layers were done, could be accidental, could be an artifact of the way it has been handled over the years, could be an artifact of the capture. Could be intentional sure but to jump to "the pigments were designed to crack a certain way so the painting looks like it does nearly 500 years later" seems to be a product of being told it's a great painting by a great artist so everything about it therefore must be great than the cracking actually being great.
- eternityforest 5y agoCould reddit's r/AskHistorians sort this out? I've never heard anything like it, but there really doesn't seem to be a lot of cracking that takes away from the effect.
- cull 5y agoIt’s called craquelure. (Forgive my short explanation. I have to get up in 4 hours.) In addition to applying thick layers of paint Rembrandt used varnish. All of this dries at different times, which leads to the cracking effect. It’s more a condition of how it was painted and the media the artists used and less about trying to achieve the effect outright. Source: I have a phd in art history, and publish and teach in this field Fun fact: the Night Watch is an inaccurate title. The title is actually Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq or The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch. It’s known as the Night Watch because of dirt and varnish—the varnish yellows over time. This changed after extensive restoration. Also, the painting has been vandalized several times. In one unfortunate event in the ‘70s a person took a knife to it. For more on craquelure see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craquelure https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craquelure. (Edited to clarify that varnish yellows over time)
- ComputerGuru 5y agoIt’s more likely that the darker pigment contributed to the cracking rather than the other way around or whatever.
- buryat 5y agolots of restoration
- fleddr 5y agoAnother interesting aspect mentioned in an earlier (dutch) article: the original painting had far more blue tones, which would contribute to a color temperature much closer to daylight (5600K), instead of the current yellowish tone. For some reason, the blues degrade, I don't know why.
- biesnecker 5y agoSeeing Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum a decade or so ago totally changed my view of seeing things in a museum vs. seeing them online. I'm a child of the internet and had this view that seeing it on my screen was good enough, but wow is Night Watch incredible up close and in person. Overwhelming, almost. A totally different experience. That said, this image is amazing, and lets you see a lot more detail than you can easily manage at the museum.
- bitexploder 5y agoOur brains just love the tactile. Knowing you are feet from the threads and paint of a master. That you can connect with this long dead artist so closely, in 3 dimensions. It’s very human.
- skhr0680 5y agoOil paintings look quite different depending on the angle you view them from too, that's something that I don't think can be recreated without some kind of VR / head tracking
- bsenftner 5y agoI did early interactive multimedia art history documentaries, with voyages into paintings through voiced over descriptions and closeup montages. It was captivating work, each documentary being 7 hours of material, in 8 languages. Because Philips and Sony were trying to prove CD-ROMs to the consumer back then, 42 years ago, they spent money. We got access to museum archives, worked on some of the first digital scans of a good number of well known pieces, and had celebrities reading the voiced over narratives. We had these weird Sony News Unix workstations with newspaper layout monitors - huge grey scale displays, spoiled me until 4K monitors finally arrived. That was '89-'94, the end of the dawn of all this digital media we take for granted today.
- DonHopkins 5y agoThat must have been quite a fun ride! It really boggles my mind how you can get such cheap light high quality monitors now. And now we just waste them displaying these ugly orange web pages and Skittles colored TypeScript code. I remember hearing about the Sony News Unix workstation, and being dismayed that it didn't run Sun's NeWS window system. ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_NEWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_NEWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
- Bud 5y agoWe should just send this out into space and call it done. Human civilization: fulfilled.
- oofbey 5y agoWhat kind of camera was used to take this?
- hackerlytest 5y agoHasselblad
- easytiger 5y agoSeminar on how it was done here by the author https://mobile.twitter.com/erdmann/status/1477946996384313344 https://mobile.twitter.com/erdmann/status/147794699638431334... https://youtu.be/z_hm5oX7ZlE https://youtu.be/z_hm5oX7ZlE 97 rows × 87 cols (8 439) @Hasselblad H6D-400c MS images Size: 925 000 px × 775 000 px (717 GP) Res: 5 µm (5080 ppi) It's a £43k camera on a huge automated gantry system controlled by python software
- spoonjim 5y agoThey didn't need such an expensive camera if they were going to do it this way. A Sony A7R would have produced an equal result.
- av3csr 5y agoThey used a Hasselblad H6D mounted on a rig
- gerdesj 5y agoMe and the wife visited the RM in Nov 2019. The painting is rather large, so 717 Giga pixels doesn't go as far as you would think but you get quite close to the textures that you would see close up. Whilst you are there, please note there is rather a lot more to see than the one picture. The architecture is worth noting too. My overriding impression of the piccies on display is: "sumptuous". That's probably not in the fine arts's lexicon of superlatives but my personal experience. The model boaty exhibition is not as jarring as it might sound, alongside some very serious artwork exhibitions and is great fun. It doesn't seem to really belong there at first blush but I do understand that naval prowess is rather important to the Netherlander psyche, so perhaps that legitimises it. It does give you a bit of relief after having rather a lot of important art thrown at you. All in all, I cannot recommend the Rijks' highly enough. If you go anywhere near the Low Countries, then slap it on your itinerary. The coffee is quite reasonable in the entrance cafe, too.
- wildzzz 5y agoI missed the RM by two days. We traveled to Amsterdam in March 2020, saw the Van Gogh museum, went to Barcelona for a few days and were planning on going to RM on our return leg. Except when we got back to Amsterdam, everything was shutting down and all we could do was eat and walk around.
- Someone 5y ago> The painting is rather large, so 717 Giga pixels doesn't go as far as you would think A billion is rather large, too. The pixels are 5 micrometers (1/200th of a millimeter). That is a lot smaller than the naked eye can see (about 1/10th of a millimeter)
- Gigachad 5y agoDoes anyone know how big the image would be in file size? This website downloads everything in tiles so its hard to tell.
- kloch 5y agoUncompressed 717 gigapixels x 24 bits / 8 = 2.151TB
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- groby_b 5y ago5.6TB You can read up on all the details on the Rijksmuseum's site dedicated to the nightwatch. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/whats-on/exhibitions/operation-night-watch/story/ultra-high-resolution-photo https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/whats-on/exhibitions/operation...
- kloch 5y agoInteresting... this implies 64 bits per pixel. What format would that be, 16 bits per color RGBA?
- kjeetgill 5y agoMaybe that size includes the redundancy with all tiling layers of different resolution? edit: reading the link in the GP closer, they seem to refer to the full imagine, but it looks like they extracted the drawing underneath the painting. So I'd guess something must be from outside the visible spectrum.
- zerd 5y agoIn this video [1] he mentions that each 100mp image is around 600MB, which aligns with the size of the 4-shot multi-shot mode of the H6D-400C MS. 8439 photos 579MB would be around 4.7TB in raw format. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_hm5oX7ZlE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_hm5oX7ZlE [2] https://www.hasselblad.com/h-system/h6d-400c-multi-shot/ https://www.hasselblad.com/h-system/h6d-400c-multi-shot/
- doosdoos 5y agoSimilar view on the Ghent Altar Piece by Van Eyck: http://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be/ghentaltarpiece/#home http://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be/ghentaltarpiece/#home
- calvinmorrison 5y agowow Rembrandt hid a map of the matterhorn and it's surroundings in the left eye... amazing what these cameras can find!
- imglorp 5y agoWhich person?
- kloch 5y agoIs the viewer open source? I saw links to give credit to various open source libraries/utils but I didn't see a link to the actual system. It works really well. I'd love to use this for one of my projects.
- BugsJustFindMe 5y agoIt's OpenSeaDragon plus addons.
- blacha 5y agolooks to be using open sea dragon [1] This is just a tiled map so any web mapping software would also work OpenLayers, Leaflet, Maplibre etc. [1] https://openseadragon.github.io/ https://openseadragon.github.io/
- _joel 5y agoInteresting, I've used leaflet a lot in the past (love it!) for GIS but never thought about tiling a more generic image to it. Good call.
- samuell 5y agoIndeed! The pinch-zooming on mobile is so smooth I for a second thought there were no library involved at all.
- supernova87a 5y agoDo they always take the image from straight on, front? Is the camera panned around with a narrow FOV so that it doesn't see portions of the canvas from an angle? Does the light source move with the camera? Or, I'm thinking, it's often really interesting to see the 3D texture of a painting -- is that ever something desired to be recorded? For example, with impressionist / pointillist paintings I've seen in person, looking at the canvas from a very low angle is even more interesting to be able to see the brush strokes than seeing it directly face-on.
- nullc 5y agoNo idea about these images, but in reproduction work it's not uncommon to work with the film plane shifted so that the camera sees the work piece from an angle (but still a flat perspective) to avoid reflections that otherwise be seen flat on.
- wildzzz 5y agoI took a geology class in college where we studied a lot of high res photos of both individual rocks and larger rock formations. They used some sort of moving bed and a microscope for the rocks so you could get really close up while also seeing larger features. The formations we're photographed using a GigaPan mount that would allow you to attach a camera with a telephoto lens and it would step in both X and Y axis to create hundreds of images it would later stitch into a composite.
- kingcharles 5y agoThis explains all the technical details - it is far more advanced than you would imagine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_hm5oX7ZlE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_hm5oX7ZlE
- femto 5y agoThe implication is that the image tiles are overlapped, so the edge of one tile falls near the center of another. That might provide enough parallax information to do a 3D reconstruction. I wonder if the raw images and metadata are available?
- Jupe 5y agoThe "little white pixels" in each corner appear to be hand-drawn registration marks. Curious - all the precision of the image but these hand-drawn tags seem quite out-of-place.
- slibhb 5y agoReally beautiful. It's impressive how seemless the experience is considering it's constantly fetching jpegs.
- ybroze 5y agoOne of my favorite paintings of all time.
- brw95 5y agoFinally an NFT I would happily pay for
- husamia 5y agoyes sir. This would be an NFT that would be worth paying for!
- jroes 5y agoAnyone know if it's possible to load something like this up on a VR headset, like an Oculus?
- thrdbndndn 5y agoWish you can disable "overshooting" when panning with a mouse.
- waynecochran 5y agoAnother document that is cool to zoom in on (not nearly as deep as this) is the great Isaiah scroll: http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/isaiah http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/isaiah Just seeing something created so long ago in detail is moving.
- sabujp 5y agoif you zoom in you can see the text in the mirror at the top middle, anyone know what it says? Here's the 44.8 gigapixel image from the museum as comparison : https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/stories/operation-night-watch/story/ultra-high-resolution-photo https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/stories/operation-night-watch/...
- d136o 5y agoAccording to wikipedia there are 18 names, and following the source/link it seems they were members of a local militia. https://intransit.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/putting-names-to-the-famous-faces-in-rembrandts-night-watch/ https://intransit.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/putting-names...
- djbeadle 5y agoApparently at some point in the past three pieces were removed from the sides of the painting. > That’s why we’ve had so-called artificial neural networks working overtime on reconstructing the original appearance of the painting. Hour upon hour, the computers have been whirring away, recreating these missing pieces on the basis of a 17th-century copy. Interactive comparison of the missing pieces: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/stories/operation-night-watch/story/missing-pieces https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/stories/operation-night-watch/... Zoomable image with the missing pieces added back in: https://i.micr.io/jfYIf/en/nw-met-missende-stukken-clean https://i.micr.io/jfYIf/en/nw-met-missende-stukken-clean
- comprev 5y agoI seem to remember they were removed to fit through the door!
- femto 5y agoThe 'z' key allows you to zoom to an arbitrary box, including magnifications that are not possible with scrolling. 'u' provides a URL for direct linking to a region. More keys are in the scripts, but these seem to be the useful ones.
- qwertox 5y ago3.63 m x 4.37 m in size. 11.9 feet x 14.3 feet.
- sdoering 5y agoI knew from this image that I have sadly not yet been able to see in person. There is a song by artist "Ayreon" called "The Shooting Company of Captain Frans B. Cocq" [1]. It is part of a concept album that describes the first person experience of the last human on mars that experiences artificial "dreams" induced by a machine traveling through history. To quote Wikipedia [2] regarding the title of the painting as context: > Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, also known as The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, but commonly referred to as The Night Watch (Dutch: De Nachtwacht), is a 1642 painting by Rembrandt van Rijn. [1]: https://youtu.be/EApiD5JQAH0 https://youtu.be/EApiD5JQAH0 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watch
- krrrh 5y agoWow, thanks for that. It’s so cool to find out about more modern proggy space rock like this.
- hayley-patton 5y agoI guess this is a better place than any to mention the King Crimson song "The Night Watch", which remarks on the painting and its imagined context. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qCXHghedxw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qCXHghedxw
- agent008t 5y agoGlad I'm not alone in loving that song and those 2 albums (Universal Migrator). Absolutely amazing. That song in particular really captures the feel of walking around old Amsterdam for me, going to see the painting, and having the Dutch Golden Age come to life. Amsterdam is one of my favourite cities, and Ayreon has a lot to do with that. I am astonished Ayreon is not a lot more mainstream popular.
- pieterr 5y agoEarlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778166
- ChainOfFools 5y ago717 Gigapicels? They should have titled this installation Rambrandt I'll, erm, show myself out.
- Barrin92 5y agothat's amazing. Although I had to chuckle because five minutes in I basically realized that my experience of looking at the painting resembled this scene: https://youtu.be/QOlPNZzneGw https://youtu.be/QOlPNZzneGw
- achow 5y agoSome interesting facts from Rijksmuseum's abstract of a talk from 2018 - not related to the painting of this post: The stitched and registered images, each exceeding 6 gigapixels, were then visualized using the “curtain viewer”, an internet-based image viewing technology developed by Erdmann for the Bosch research and conservation project. For this high resolution photography the museum faced several challenges. For the overall images of these large paintings, a total of 242 images were required. This amounts to approximately 70 Gb per painting per imaging modality. The maximum storage capacity of the Rijksmuseum’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) software is currently only 2 Gb per file. It was also an enormous undertaking to stitch such a large number of composite images and register them for use in the curtain viewers, enabling the conservators to fluidly switch from an overall image to the micro level and back using only the mouse wheel. https://aics46thannualmeeting2018.sched.com/event/Cz5i/imaging-technology-high-resolution-imaging-as-a-new-research-tool-in-the-rijksmuseum https://aics46thannualmeeting2018.sched.com/event/Cz5i/imagi...
- BtM909 5y agoWhy not link to the original? https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/stories/operation-night-watch/story/ultra-high-resolution-photo https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/stories/operation-night-watch/...
- alashow 5y agoThe linked website is owned by the scientist that worked on the project and works for the museum
- GistNoesis 5y agoHave you found Waldo ? (Just kidding ;) ) What I'd like to have next is a way to change the viewing direction and the lighting dynamically. Paint color is not like a screen pixel. It changes depending on the light color, and direction. Nightwatch maybe was intended to be watched lit by a dancing flame. I am very hopeful for new rendering techniques like Nerfies, for this type of application. It also has the potential to reverse the effect time had on the painting, so we could experience this it like it was painted.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoWhat's a good way of showing extremely high resolution images like this? I did a few absolutely spectacular renders some years ago of a buddhabrot fractal, I don't remember the resolution but probably at least 100k x 100k, but after weeks of rendering I couldn't show it to anyone. I could only view it piecewise myself, as it didn't fit in RAM. It's been a bit of a white whale for me. I also have a high-res animated 4D rotation render that's half a dozen Gb, but can't be streamed online because compression algorithms absolutely massacre the details, and nobody wants to download files that big.
- justusthane 5y agoThis is what this site uses: https://openseadragon.github.io/ https://openseadragon.github.io/
- genewitch 5y agoI did a bit of looking around at 4k matrix hardware, and it's pricey. There's probably someone making 8k by now, so it's just a matter of paying the high cost. Or get 1:16 1080p or something. Other than that, 4k HDR TVs are cheap. Obviously 4k is too few, but at least you can make it 75" for under $1000... As far as animations go, ffmpeg can work miracles.
- zamadatix 5y agoApart from that needing to be a matrix of over 1200 4k TVs or over 300 8k TVs the problem here is opening and viewing the image not displaying it in full all at once. ffmpeg would run into the same RAM issues, the only approach to viewing such images is to split the image up into separate pieces and make multiple scale levels then feed it into a viewer that understands which pieces at which scale to load.
- Synaesthesia 5y agoIpad has a nice high red and bright screen I suppose.
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- omega3 5y agoHyper resolutions are nice but for paintings especially the interesting stuff is in 3d - the paint strokes, layers of paint etc. I remeber seeing cool 3d recreation of painting being used in Fake or Fortune but can't remember the name of the startup that did it.
- pettycashstash2 5y agoamazing that you can see all the cracks in the paint when zoomed in. Preserving this clearly is of importance, but digitizing allows us a snapshot for comparative restoration. Hope whoever is in charge of restoring this does not end up like the botched restoration of Jesus Fresco in Spain.
- Kaotique 5y agoDon't worry, it is being taken care of very seriously: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/stories/operation-night-watch https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/stories/operation-night-watch
- tedmcory77 5y agoIn 2001 I flew across the world to see this painting. Got lost in the museum trying to find it and came in through a side door. Upon seeing it, I needed a seat, there conveniently was one. The in person experience was so different than seeing this online because of the scale and detail.
- fallingfrog 5y agoI'm just noticing the shadow of the hand on the jacket of the man holding the spear. What an interesting detail to add! I don't know if anyone would have noticed that not being there. I also notice the perfect use of color on the blue tassel of the spear- how did he get the shade of paint in the light and dark parts of the tassel so exactly correct? It's almost like this was drawn from a photograph- but that can't be. I wonder if he had live models standing in to draw from? Also, I notice that the boots they are wearing actually look very practical- they're shoes when you need shoes, and long boots when you need boots. What a good idea.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoIs it possible to download the actual image file? I'm aware that most conventional software will probably choke on it (which is kind of why I want to try it).