Most detailed ever photograph of The Night Watch goes online | Hacker News Reader

Most detailed ever photograph of The Night Watch goes online

rijksmuseum.nl

396 pointsSomeone125 comments

For those who would be interested in downloading the picture, or other images using the same technology, I maintain a set of opensource zoomable image downloaders :

- dezoomify : https://github.com/lovasoa/dezoomify (a browser-based tool that recreates the image as an HTML5 canvas. Limited by the maximal size of canvases in browsers)

- dezoomify-rs : https://github.com/lovasoa/dezoomify-rs (a command-line utility that can download larger images, including the one presented in this post)

- dezoomify-extension: https://github.com/lovasoa/dezoomify-extension/ (a browser extension that finds zoomable images in web pages and allows downloading them with dezoomify)

If you are passionate about high-resolution art and know javascript or rust, you can come contribute !

Thank you very much for creating this tool. I once looked into into doing the same but lost interest. Really great to get some Egon Schiele in high resolution format!

One suggestion: Print out WHERE the image is saved after downloading, I had a hard time realising it's sitting in the root of my home folder...

In dezoomify-rs, the place where the file is saved is displayed when the file is downloaded.

In dezoomify, the application cannot know where you saved the picture, since the browser does not share the location of the download folder with webpages.

dezoomify-rs shows the following message (MacOS): "Saved the image to Kneeling Girl_ Resting on Both Elbows - Egon Schiele.jpg"

No folder/path visible here.

Perhaps it's relative to the application's current working directory?

Binary is in ~/Downloads/dezoomify-rs/, image was saved in ~/.

It is relative to the current working directory, which is not necessarily the same as the directory the binary is in. We could display the full path, though. Interested in making a PR ?

Unix programs start, not in the directory that their binaries are in, but rather in the directory that their parent processes are in. That could be the directory of the binary if the parent process did a chdir(2) there before spawning the child, but command-line shells never do that unless the user explicitly typed "cd".

Oh yes, I see. The path is shown relative to the current working directory.

Hi, I'm the creator of the image and of the Curtain Viewer technique and software. Please note that this is hosted on my personal AWS and that I pay the hosting costs out of pocket.

That museum really is a treasure, and well worth a visit if you're ever in wonderful Amsterdam. Not right now I guess what with the crowds and everything, but hopefully this too shall pass.

I think it's really funny that the always-pedalling Dutch included a bike lane through the museum [1], that feels very right and also quite unique.

[1] https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/the-bicycle-pa...

The whole reconstruction of the museum was very nicely done with huge windows letting in plenty of light. It did cost 400 million euros though

It also took ten years during which the museum was closed. The original building took about eight years to build.

And they originally wanted to close the bicycle path that everyone here is so lyrical about; it took a lot of activism by locals to save it.

Also, for some reason this art piece looks better live than on paper or on screen. It may have something to do with its size and how eye handles it live.

In my experience, the gap between the original and any sort of reproduction grows as the craftsmanship goes up.

For most artists who are known as great masters (such as Rembrandt), it really does only take seeing a few in person to be like, “yep, s/he is clearly among the best.”

There is an impact of very large paintings that you definitely lose in a photograph. It's not that such paintings are only good because they're big. But viewing a painting that fills a wall is just a different experience from looking at even a much smaller version of the same scene. This is probably especially true with large figure groupings like The Night Watch.

The visceral sensation of seeing something big can only be produced by a live viewing: think of seeing the grand canyon live vs seeing a photo of it, even a very high quality one.

Surprisingly, your visual perception of something can actually be affected by how big you think its image is, even if it is not live.

The "vertical-horizontal illusion" is an optical illusion where a vertical line appears to be longer than a horizontal line of the same length. It turns out that this illusion is more pronounced in larger images, even if the image has the same content. In fact, some researchers used monocular VR to show that your perception of horizontal vs. vertical scale can be altered just by making you believe that the image you are viewing is scaled to a TV vs. a movie theater screen -- even when you are constrained to view exactly the same pixels in both cases.

I have a pet theory that this may be why film stars thought that TV cameras "added ten pounds"... Viewing a face at smaller-than-life size could make you perceive it as a little more squat than it really is.

(I learned this from a talk by Dennis Proffitt... might be from this paywalled article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/p3053 )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical%E2%80%93horizontal_il...

this is probably a good detail in favor of VR museums :)

> That museum really is a treasure, and well worth a visit if you're ever in wonderful Amsterdam.

Absolutely. I'm not hugely into paintings as such. But when I visited the Rijksmuseum, the sheer craftsmanship displayed by so many of the paintings just blew my mind.

Photographs does not do the paintings justice. Even this one. The 3d nature of the paintings and the complex way the structure and paint interacts with the light cannot be reproduced by a photograph. To view them is an experience, and is well worth the visit.

Hmm what crowds...? I think Amsterdam is as empty as any other major city in the West

Until the sun comes out, then everyone is picnicking on the grass. Especially in the park right outside the rijksmuseum.

Those are probably not tourists. Are the main canal streets packed? the coffee shops? the restaurants? the city gets 20 million tourists a year on a normal year. This isnt gonna happen on 2020.

That bicycle path is delightfully surreal, and I'm slightly happier knowing it exists.

A long time ago I worked on a series of CDROMs detailing Vermeer's Chick with the Pearl Earring (unofficial name) and Bellini's Feast of the Gods.

We included infra-red, x-ray and colour information and overlayed them. Users could scroll around the surface of the paintings in great details looking at how the artist constructed their work. The tech we used was previously used to render 3D globes with overlayed information. I think you could only buy the CDROMs at the Washington Museum of Art.

At the time it was pretty ground breaking and I certainly enjoyed working on it. It's amazing to think that this is all free on the web now at massively high resolutions.

I think if you want to do it right you could even use incident light from different angles, camera from different angles, do a spectral analysis per pixel, measure thickness of paint, measure/extract specularity/diffusion and stuff like that.

Why do you have to use derogatory language to describe Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring?

Oh, no, he's referring to the little-known Vermeer painting of a literal young chicken with a pearl earring on its head.

Chick is "informal + sometimes offensive"

Offense is taken, not given

So why take offense to this? Explained above that the unofficial name is used as a term of endearment, and obviously not used in a demeaning context.

I can't imagine self-censorship to avoid offending a painting.

Even better, the young woman in the painting isn't a girl and she isn't even real. It's all imagined by Vermeer.

No one minds that she is called a 'girl' when she is most definitely a young woman even by today's standards and most definitely by the standards of the day.

All of this was 20 odd years ago though, for me, when the term chick was much more widely used in both the US and UK.

> the young woman in the painting... isn't even real

There is some evidence that Vermeer could have been using optical tools to create his photo-realistic paintings.

If so, she would have been a real person, as that is how the technique is imagined to work - use an optical apparatus that allows you to see your painting and the subject in the same view, and then paint so that they blend into each other.

A pretty cool documentary was made about this called Tim's Vermeer[1] (starring Tim Jenison and directed by Penn & Teller), and led to an installation at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania. Really interesting, and well worth experiencing both!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%27s_Vermeer

"Never offend anyone" seems a dubious goal to me.

You're reading too much in to it. This was the informal title the curators often used for the painting. It was a sign of affection for what is a wonderful painting of a very enigmatic young woman. The art historians and scientists we worked with always used the formal names of course.

> You're reading too much in to it.

Is that true? I don't doubt that you meant no harm, but the language is demeaning regardless of intent or origin.

Yeah, something about how "the network is the storage support".

Nerdwriter has an excellent video explaining the painting in detail. I'm excited to rewatch this while being able to view the painting in even greater detail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E8f64yj1Jk

Amazing! Both the art and the way they implemented this visualization. I'm using a modest machine and had it freeze before when opening large resolution images on the browser, so I thought that would be the result when I opened this link. To my surprise it worked smoothly and efficiently.

Yes, I had to lookup what they used to get it so smooth when zooming. Looks like it's this:

https://openseadragon.github.io/

Don't miss also http://boschproject.org/

which uses the hyper-resolution.org technology with the works of Hieronymus Bosch, adding super high-res images beyond visible light, with a "curtain" effect.

Hard to explain but fascinating stuff.

It breaks the gesture to go back on ios and makes the standard pinch zoom much such slower with a gross inertia.

Clearly the wrong device for looking at this and it needs to be displayed large.

Thanks! Creator of the image and the viewer here. The viewer is a fork of OSD I made in approximately 2012 to add the functionality that I call the "Curtain Viewer".

For a really interesting background to the painting, see [1].

The painting originally had no name. A 1715 copy gave it the name "Officers and other civic guardsmen of District II of Amsterdam, under the command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch". A 1797 engraving added the nickname "Night Watch".

So today, the painting's preferred full name is [2] in Dutch:

* "Officieren en andere schutters van wijk II in Amsterdam onder leiding van kapitein Frans Banninck Cocq en luitenant Willem van Ruytenburch, bekend als de ‘Nachtwacht’"

and in English:

* "Officers and other civic guardsmen of District II of Amsterdam, under the command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch, known as the ‘Night Watch’"

[1] https://jhna.org/articles/amsterdam-civic-guard-portraits-wi...

[2] http://www.getty.edu/cona/CONAFullSubject.aspx?subid=7000018...

WHOAH!!! I clicked (zoomed), and I clicked and I clicked and I clicked (8 times). At some point around the 6th-7th clicked I actualy said "WHOAH" out loud and people around me looked at me. Now that is magnificent. I've seen the painting inthe Rijks museum some years back. It is simply amazing.

Edit: remember when you want to see a painting from really up close.. and they don't let you? It's like looking at the painting with a magnifying glass!

What do you think this red splodge is? It looks like someone was like "oops i got red paint on the masterpiece" and not part of it.

http://hyper-resolution.org/view.html?pointer=0.480,0.002&r=...

A freckle

Little know fact: this painting was cropped a significant amount on one edge. I suspect it was the left edge.

The reason it was cropped... to fit into a room.

Mostly from the left, but also from the top, right, and, least, from the bottom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watch#Location_and_a...)

We know because there’s a 17th century copy in London: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/gerrit-lundens-...

AH! I did not know that. Thanks. I had only assumed the left. Many years as an art teacher gave me a sixth sense to detect when a painting has been cropped.

This is great and the technical implementation (browsing large image) is good.

But I must be getting old, I didn't see the "See the photograph" button at first, I read the article, came back here to look for a link, realized people where commenting about it so I must have missed it, went back, looked at my screen for nearly a minute to finally see the button.

I'd say that's just awful UI. Looks just like a normal header for a block of text.

> didn't see the "See the photograph" button

Maybe because it's a link, not a button? ;-)

(I'm old, and it took me a minute as well.)

> The 24 rows of 22 pictures were stitched together digitally with the aid of neural networks.

I can totally see how that went down:

Engineer: We really don't need neural networks to do that.

Project person: <Angry look>

Engineer: One image-stitching "neural" "network" coming right up, do you want it "deep-learned", "convolutional" or both ?

Some more details about the painting, “10 things you may not know about Rembrandt’s Night Watch”: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijks-stories/10-things-night-...

If this sort of thing interests you have a look at:

https://picturae.com/en/

I am interested in the software used to process the many images required for this kind of documentation. I heard that it behaves more like a spreadsheet than a traditional photo editor.

Picturae's workflow software is second to none that I've seen in the field, they did a very good job. Also, their color calibration hardware/software combination is top notch and that really is a great thing to have when you are in the archival business. They also know how to handle valuables. Highly recommended.

https://github.com/openseadragon/openseadragon for anyone interested in how this was implemented

I really hope we get more of this type of content from other museums. It's fantastic to be able to have that much detail. We really need something like this on a CDN like google maps almost.

Here are 1847 of them, on a CDN that is almost like Google Maps. https://artsandculture.google.com/project/gigapixels

Related: The Van Eyck exhibition in Ghent has put up a highly detailed photograph of the Ghent Altarpiece at http://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be

This review talks about the birds outside you can only see with zooming in many times https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n08/julian-bell/kestrel-...

I hope they have used proper lightning when taking the photographs, because the type of lightning in the exhibition hall (where the painting is still standing) is rather poor, due to the so-called daylight LED lamps, that however have a poorly defined spectrum not matching true day light conditions. This causes the red colors to look rather pale and shows some colors as different, probably due to different combinations of pigments that look the same under daylight, but now appear different.

These types of comments always get under my skin. They took a 45 gigapixel photo of a 350-year-old Rembrandt, I'm pretty sure they didn't shoot it in the exhibition hall using "so-called daylight LED lamps."

I am pretty sure they did shoot it in the exhibition hall, the painting is rather big.

Further, the OP actually brings in own experiences, you are merely guessing.

Yeah, because professional museum curators and art restoration teams are well known to just shake their heads at safely moving large exhibits, baffled at the prospect.

C'mon.

If I were a curator, I would refuse to move a 3.5x4.5 meter painting from 1642 just for taking a picture.

It seems like a no-brainer to bring the camera to the painting instead of the other way around.

Dude. Here is a photo of the setup. They didn't move it.

https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/nightwatch

Edit: Here is an actual video -> https://www.instagram.com/p/B00YJ7tFbyB/

As can be seen there, they of course relied on their own lighting as is standard for archival and studio photography.

This talks about an X-ray fluorescence (XRF) scanner, which uses X-rays (not visible light) to scan the painting.

It's the same scanner setup regardless of the scan that is being done. I don't know about lighting though. Here you can see some of the resulting images from a scan and they are pretty dark, but this paint is dark so who knows. https://youtu.be/l3QlXyZJpgs?t=3513

Well, go look at the photo. Do the colours look right to you?

I am not good at judging colors, as most people are, but I do know an artist who is quite good at it, and who has studied colors for all his life and has complained about the poor lightning conditions in museums for a long time. Maybe I should ask him to have a look at it.

I asked the artist, who has a lot of experiences with mixing colors (he has made several color palettes on conmission) and on lightning (he developed a combination of three types of lamps, which gives the best reproduction of daylight, consisting of a daylight LED lamp and two types of fluorescent lamps), and he said that he did not know of a rgb sensor that gives a faitfull reproduction of daylight colors. He said that to compare the quality one would have to compare it with the work in daylight condition.

I do not know if this picture was taken with a multi-spectral camera or with a three (rgb) channel camera. Maybe with a multi-spectral camera one could find a method to accurately reproduce the experience of viewing the work in daylight conditions.

Of course anything viewed on a computer screen is still going to be limited by the quality of your screen.

Well, for centuries people called the painting "night watch" because the colors were so faded, they thought it depicted night time, eventhough it's really daylight

It isn't so much that colors in paintings such as this fade, as it is that the varnish becomes opaque and occludes the colors beneath. Environmental factors, dust, and such contribute to how you see the colors, but they haven't gone away.

Much of the work of conservation is actually removing the varnish and re-varnishing it. They make photographs like this to help determine -how much- varnish should be removed, and to hedge against damage in the process. Often they must re-apply colors when the removal causes flakes or disturbs unknown faults in the structure of the painting.

Have you been to the Rijksmuseum and seen the painting? the colours are incredibly intense and most definitely not faded. If anything the opposite is the problem - the varnish that's been put on the painting is pretty dark.

> For much of its existence, the painting was coated with a dark varnish, which gave the incorrect impression that it depicted a night scene, leading to the name by which it is now commonly known.[7]... The varnish was removed only in the 1940s.

Almost a decade since the first gigapixel of this painting went online[1], and they've gone from about 14 gigapixels to 44, which in layperson's terms feels like another zoom level.

The main difference is in the conservation work, lighting and post processing.

[1] https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-night-watch-remb...

Ah good old openseadragon. Such a great js library

My idea from decades ago, which I'd love to see implemented, is to capture the height information of the painting and reconstruct it in the browser using physically based rendering. Let the viewer decide what environment to put the painting in, and be able to move around and inspect from every angle. That's the biggest thing that's missing when looking at paintings online: there's no depth and no setting. Some paintings literally shimmer from small dots of glossy paint, others are heavily built up, I want that recreated online.

It's not in a browser per se but this New Yorker article from a few years ago goes into how a company uses various high-tech scanners to create very convincing reproduction of paintings that include their depth: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/the-factory-of...

I can't even imagine how much time it took to paint something this detailed and not make many mistakes. I wish we could see it as it was when it was finished (clearly time has taken a toll).

From documentaries I've watched there are plenty of changes/mistakes/cover-ups, and they spot this with x-rays. I wouldn't be surprised that the same would (or already is) discovered for this massive painting as well.

I look forward to eventually seeing entire collections viewable online in this way. For a variety of reasons which don't need detailing, huge numbers of people will never ever have the opportunity to stand in front of great paintings in collections across the world. It's also true that photographs like this provide an experience not available or rarely available to those who are able to visit collections in person.

Beautifully managed museum!. Web version is build seriously. The design, collection, virtual tour inside the museum. Made me to visit this place someday.

thanks for this!

You can zoom in way beyond what's reasonable. It's gorgeous, but better to see the whole thing than the cracks in the individual brush strokes.

Especially since it seems to need cleaning, badly. Dark, muddy, even the parts that are meant to look illuminated (man in white, woman in back) are muddy.

FTA: “The second phase of Operation Night Watch, the restoration of the painting, has been rescheduled due to the pandemic.”

They made this photograph to have a reference image.

Excellent! This work definitely deserves careful attention.

Seeing this painting in person (completely alone during the period when the painting was in an outbuilding during the Rijksmuseum renovation) completely transformed my appreciation of art. It really doesn't translate well to the photographed medium. I'm not sure my monitor can even represent the range of illumination from the darkest to brightest spots.

This is spectacular -- I suspect you can see at least as much as you'd be able to see with your eyes if you were able to get arbitrarily close to it.

Does anyone know what the text says? Extracted as best I could here: https://i.imgur.com/iAsGPT8.png

The names of the people who paid for the painting. "Eighteen names appear on a shield, painted circa 1715, in the center-right background, as the hired drummer was added to the painting for free." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watch#Commission

thanks!

Eyes are still much better at extracting 3D info from paintings (e.g. paint thickness, texture, etc.). This could potentially be replicated by photographing each point on the painting from two angles.

That looks weird.

I did already see pictures made by google from Art galleries and you could make out painting details (hair, color, hight of colors) but this does very very smothed out even when zooming in completly. No details from the canvas.

Is that an issue i missread? Is it how they made the picture or is the canvas really that smooth?

Weird how this morning I was on their API page for an exercise/project I want to tackle (I needed a realistic data source).

https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/ You could build out this for any of their objects in their collections.

Nerdwriter covered this expertly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E8f64yj1Jk

Nerdwriter is an amazing youtube channel where he does breakdowns like this of all kids of art, film, celebrities, etc.

Any other sources like this?

I only know http://boschproject.org/

I would love to virtually stroll a museum this way.

https://artsandculture.google.com/project/gigapixels

If you have a university library account, ArtStor (https://www.artstor.org/) is probably the biggest resource out there for detailed paintings, although it's behind a paywall and some images are better quality than others.

Looks amazing, sadly I don't.

Yeah I don't either anymore. However, ArtStor does let you create credentials independent of a school account (once you've logged in with a school account through the library). Thus, if you have someone who does have university access you can have them make you an account without them having to share their full university credentials with you.

amazing. you can see a lot more than going to rijks as it's usually crowded with people trying to see it... and you can't stand as close!

It's a great painting,

but I'm admittedly a little disappointed the headline didn't refer to some project around the Sergei Lukyanenko novel.

Interesting how the "crash test dummy" positional markers at the corners are hand-drawn, not printed.

still remember the museum night me and my brother in law where one of the first people into the museum. we went to the nachtwacht right away and where able to view it without anyone else in the room for a long time.

With no IBC this year, their website is a good way to get my Dutch Master fix.

What’s the significance of “The Night Watch” artistically?

From the Wikipedia: The painting is famous for three things: its colossal size (363 cm × 437 cm (11.91 ft × 14.34 ft)), the dramatic use of light and shadow (tenebrism) and the perception of motion in what would have traditionally been a static military group portrait. The painting was completed in 1642, at the peak of the Dutch Golden Age. It depicts the eponymous company moving out, led by Captain Frans Banninck Cocq (dressed in black, with a red sash) and his lieutenant, Willem van Ruytenburch (dressed in yellow, with a white sash). With effective use of sunlight and shade, Rembrandt leads the eye to the three most important characters among the crowd: the two men in the center (from whom the painting gets its original title), and the woman in the centre-left background carrying a chicken. Behind them, the company's colors are carried by the ensign, Jan Visscher Cornelissen. The figures are almost life-size.

Rembrandt has displayed the traditional emblem of the arquebusiers in a natural way, with the woman in the background carrying the main symbols. She is a kind of mascot herself; the claws of a dead chicken on her belt represent the clauweniers (arquebusiers), the pistol behind the chicken represents clover and she is holding the militia's goblet. The man in front of her is wearing a helmet with an oak leaf, a traditional motif of the arquebusiers. The dead chicken is also meant to represent a defeated adversary. The colour yellow is often associated with victory.

I found a small insect that has been painted over. It's only visible at the max magnification. I saw it, but then lost it again when I closed the window. Can anyone else see it?

I don't, but I did find Waldo.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Jon Snow isn’t even in this wth

As a dutch person it feels terrible to see the name of the art work translated to English. The dutch know this art work as the "nacht wacht".

The tech behind this all is very impressive non the less.

It's the official English name of the painting, thouhg. I don't see the problem the words are literally translated.

Night Watch is a pretty spot on translation of "Nachtwacht". Why does it feel terrible?

Not the person you’re replying to (and I don’t speak Dutch) but I hadn’t realized the painting’s name rhymed in Dutch. Since I assume Rembrandt chose the title of the piece deliberately it does feel like a certain je ne sais quoi is lost in the non-rhyming English translation.

Nacht Wacht was not the original title. It was originally called _"De compagnie van kapitein Frans Banninck Cocq en luitenant Willem van Ruytenburgh maakt zich gereed om uit te marcheren"_, which means "The company of captain Frans Banninck Cocq en lieutenant Willen van Ruytenburgh prepare themselves to go marching".

At the time it was controversial, because normally such militias standing in a nice orderly fashion. Rembrand instead chose to paint this chaos, and apparently the people who commissioned it weren't happy.

At some point two sides were cut off to make it fit in a smaller room, and when it was rediscovered, it was very dark due to the many layers of old varnish. There's where it got the name "Nacht Wacht". Restoration of the painting made it a lot brighter again.

The name stuck, though. The original title is a bit cumbersome.

Amusingly, that didn't stop Dutch prog-metal pioneer Arjen Lucassen from entitling his musical tribute to this painting "The Shooting Company of Captain Franz B. Cocq". You'd think "Night Watch" would be easier to fit into a rhyme....

I will have to look that up. I only know 'Into The Electric Castle', 'Ambeon' and a handful other things. I clearly have some catching up to do.

Around the time that "nacht wacht" has bean pained nearly nobody in the Netherlands spoke English so that ha probably nothing to do with it.

English is a required second language here in the Netherlands. Like 80% here can speak it. It is so popular that many thing are English on default here now. Nearly all our radio music is English, university classes are English, Public Transport switches from dutch and English when it gets close to the bigger city's like Amsterdam or Rotterdam.

So if you ask a random Dutch person what kind of music he likes it is on default English other wise he will tell you specific. For the few words that we still use the dutch words to foreigners we have the opposite. We like to use the dutch word and don't translate it because it is just be a bit strange.

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