Masterpieces Online — High Culture At High Resolution 99
crimeandpunishment writes "You can now see the finest details of some of the finest Italian masterpieces with just one click of your mouse. High-resolution images of classic paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio, and Botticelli are now online with that opportunity. You can zoom in to the smallest details, even ones you wouldn't see when viewing the paintings in person at a museum. The images have a resolution of up to 28 billion pixels, which is about 3,000 times more than a photo from an average digital camera."
Re:and who said that 10Mpix is more than enough? (Score:3, Informative)
You only need more pixels when you need a larger image and you need to be closer than what the current number allows. A 6mp camera is more than enough for a billboard, where you're expecting to be a hundred feet away or more. Whereas a 20mp camera wouldn't be anywhere near enough if you were expecting to stand 10 feet away.
But, then again, I know you're making a lame joke based upon something that was originally a misquote, carry on.
Links to the actual images... (Score:5, Informative)
Caravaggio, Bacchus [haltadefinizione.com]
Botticelli, The Birth of Venus [haltadefinizione.com]
Sandro Botticelli, La Primavera [haltadefinizione.com]
Note that these images are not... (Score:3, Informative)
...protected by copyright under USA law. If you are in the USA you are free to download them and share them.
Re:Another cool site (Score:4, Informative)
Link is goatse.
I feel poorly.
Re:and who said that 10Mpix is more than enough? (Score:3, Informative)
I know you're either trolling, or joking, but these images are made by taking an orderly group of images of small parts of the painting by rows and columns to get complete coverage with a professional dslr and good lens, and then stitching the images together with software. There are many, many examples of these types of images out on the internet. You can find pictures of this type of cities, mountains in the Alps, and many other subjects by Googling for giga-pixel images.
Re:Links to the actual images... (Score:2, Informative)
Verrocchio, Leonardo da Vinci, Battesimo di Cristo [haltadefinizione.com]
Leonardo da Vinci, Annunciazione [haltadefinizione.com]
Re:I Don't See ... (Score:3, Informative)
Real life is usually subtractive color, not additive.
Re:I Don't See ... (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, I know there's no such colour as... [insert combo-of-whatevers here] ...but it's still a convenient shorthand for what we SEE. Imagine if these what-we-see colours had no names and you had to refer to each by its numbers!
What you "see" is a combination of colors, essentially red, green, and blue. Technically, natural light is a continuous spectrum of colors with a complex map of varying intensities, but your eyes physically can't sense that. In effect, your eyes have only "blue-yellow" and "green-red" sensors, which are mathematically identical to an additive mixture of red, green, and blue. It's not a cheat, or an over-simplification, monitors are designed to match how humans see. There are lots of limitations to color reproduction, like the color filters not having a truly pure color, which reduces the gamut, but that's improved a lot in recent years. There's no such thing as "brown", really, either on a computer screen, or in the natural world.
As to examining pixels, that's what I wound up doing because the initial brown looked wrong (like it wanted to be a bruised purple instead). There's nothing stupid about taking something down to its component parts to see why it's not working.
Did you notice the red-green-blue sliders in the color selection dialog box of your image editor? That's exactly what it does. You don't have to get your face up close to the monitor!
I've seen exactly *one* LCD that I deemed entirely suitable, and the damned thing cost $2200 (and that was at the trade-show discount). A wee ways out of my budget, probably for the next century.
For a professional grade monitor, that's cheap. Most graphic artists I know work with $10K+ monitors, like the HP DreamColor range.
One of the issues that drives me nuts is that they're sensitive to viewing angle. Not so much from side-to-side anymore but still from up-to-down. So if you don't always slouch at the same height, the image changes. The very expensive one lacked this visual defect.
Mine is perfect within 20 degrees in all directions, and I got it 5 years ago for $1000, delivered. The same 24" model from Dell is about $300 now, I think. Most professionals have switched to LCDs, because the color shifting issues have been fixed on all of the high-end monitors, and they now have better color reproduction overall than CRTs.
And as you note there's the issue of matching the video card to the LCD, notably the resolution. Not an issue with a CRT. I really hate being stuck on someone else's notion of MY ideal resolution, because otherwise the aspect ratio is munged, or it displays interlaced (I've seen both problems).
If your video card can't handle 2D at common display resolutions, you seriously need to upgrade. Ancient embedded cards can handle that. I've seen people run 2560x1600 resolutions just fine with a $50 video card.
I've also found the average LCD's total light output wearing on my eyes.
They have brightness controls, you know. Mine can give you sunburn if you let it, but I just set it to a moderate level, and it's fine.
I suppose if I was made of money, or doing graphics as a fulltime job, it would be worth whatever investment was required to get it how I want it. As it is, my stone-age solution works better for me, for a fraction of the investment.
Zero investment is more like it. You can get a professional-grade monitor for under $1000 if you do you research and find a good deal.
Re:The images have logos stamped on them (Score:2, Informative)
Look at the source code of (for example) http://www.haltadefinizione.com/magnifier.jsp?idopera=10 [haltadefinizione.com]. In there you'll find this code:
swf.addVariable("xml","/immagini/opere/10/imgfull/properties_krpano.xml");
That's a relative address—the full URL is http://www.haltadefinizione.com/immagini/opere/10/imgfull/properties_krpano.xml [haltadefinizione.com]. That file contains stuff like this:
The URL, again, is relative (to the XML file) and points to http://www.haltadefinizione.com/immagini/opere/10/imgfull/venere_krpano/l7_%250v_%250h.jpg [haltadefinizione.com], where %0v and %0h are the vertical and horizontal coordinates, respectively. Since this level is 181273 pixels wide and 113625 pixels (taken from the "level" tag), and tiles are 256x256 pixels (taken from the "image" tag), you can grab all images at this level with the fusker string http://www.haltadefinizione.com/immagini/opere/10/imgfull/venere_krpano/l7_[01-444]_[01-709].jpg. Be careful downloading the whole picture at this detail level (7). It's 314,796 tiles! If you just want a wallpaper-sized image for this image, try downloading detail level 1, which is 2833x1776 pixels (84 tiles) (fusker string: http://www.haltadefinizione.com/immagini/opere/10/imgfull/venere_krpano/l1_[01-07]_[01-12].jpg).
By the way, the watermarks are all embedded directly in the tile sets, unfortunately. They seem to be stamped on every tile whose coordinates modulo 4 are 0, meaning only 1/16 of the images are stamped.
Happy downloading!
Re:The images have logos stamped on them (Score:2, Informative)
If you do decide to download the full images, keep this in mind: Each tile image is between about 15KB and 50KB or so (let's say 30KB average), so the full detail image consists of roughly 9 gigabytes of JPEG images. Please, everyone, for the sake of their servers don't try to download it all at once! (I would personally try to trickle download it over the course of a week or so to be nice on their servers.)