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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Only the visible spectrum, with light coming from one direction only? Researchers will probably want more.

Van Gogh Worldwide has a number of photos of paintings done with raking light and sometimes even X-ray. The raking light really allows one to see the amount of paint applied.

I am intrigued by your comment. Is there a real effort to photograph paintings in nonvisible spectrum and fuller set of angles?

Non-visible spectrum, including x-ray, is common.

It allows one to see what’s below the surface (sketches or painted-over parts)

Researchers also use all kinds of machinery to figure out how paintings were made, what materials were used, etc.

A painting by Rembrandt was put in a synchrotron, for example (https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-discover-unusual-compou...)

Fuller sets of angles also is fairly normal and must have happened for some of van Gogh’s paintings, since you can or could buy 3D prints of them (https://all3dp.com/3d-printing-van-gogh-painting/)

OpenSeaDragon https://openseadragon.github.io/examples/in-the-wild/ (an open source package that can provide the deep zooming experience just like MicrIO used for these paintings) has been used for this collection:

http://boschproject.org/book_links.html

where you can compare the visible light with some kind of UV (I guess? you have to buy the book to find out), eg:

http://boschproject.org/view.html?mode=curtain&layout=top-ma...

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