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Comment by fjfaase | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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, 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.

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.

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