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717 Gigapixel Image of Rembrandt's Nightwatch

(hyper-resolution.org)
565 points gaws | 3 comments | 25 Jan 22 00:15 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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biesnecker ◴[25 Jan 22 01:17 UTC] No.30066616[source]▶
Seeing 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.

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vmception ◴[25 Jan 22 04:54 UTC] No.30068206[source]▶
Same, in a similar note I’ve been a big fan of Alphonse Mucha and Art Nouveau all my life and I had no idea that he used gold paint!

Having seen so many jpegs and pictures in books of his works, it did not convey or describe this at all!

I passed one in a gallery one time (not looking for one) and the sheen from the lights reflecting totally changed everything in a more amazing way!

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modeless ◴[25 Jan 22 08:00 UTC] No.30069366[source]▶
An RGB value per pixel is not all of the information you need to render a painting accurately! To capture the effect you describe, paintings should be scanned with something that can capture a BDRF. Then viewing them in VR could give a very accurate experience.
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1. baq ◴[25 Jan 22 08:38 UTC] No.30069630[source]▶
i had to google BDRF: Bidirectional reflectance distribution function

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_reflectance_dist...

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2. amelius ◴[25 Jan 22 10:47 UTC] No.30070397[source]▶
Shouldn't that include the color spectrum, and perhaps the polarization of the light?
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3. modeless ◴[25 Jan 22 16:07 UTC] No.30073439[source]▶
Yes, if you want to go all the way. There are many simplified formulations of BDRFs that are commonly used that ignore polarization and even wavelength dependent effects (e.g. metallic/roughness used in physically based rendering for games which has only two parameters on top of the base color), but they would still be a huge improvement over not capturing any BDRF data at all.