🚀 go-pugleaf

There is a rather interesting article in the August 15th issue of
the Economist, describing what Washington's National Gallery of
Art and Munich's Pinakothek are doing regarding image processing
of paintings.  The National Gallery is building a computer system
covering 2,800 of its American works.  Whereas photographs fade
and wrinkle, the digital images are accurate, detailed and last
forever.  The digital images will be able to track how the colors
of the paintings change over time; yellows are especially bad.

The National Gallery is using their system to determine if the
pictures need cleaning.  They swab a small section of a dirty
painting, letting their computer work out differences between the
clean and the dirty parts, and then apply these differences to the
digital record of the painting as a whole, producing a computer-
generated image of what a picture would look like were the whole
thing to be given a scrub.

Another technique, borrowed from satellite imaging, is to exaggerate
the color contrasts within a painting's digital image.  Apply the
trick to Jan Gossaert's "Adoration of the Magi", for example, and a
pair of cherubs, long darkened to the same muddy brown as the beam
they are sitting on spring to view.

Computers will also change art galleries for visitors, too.  By
putting their paintings on computer, galleries can make them
easier to find, understand and appreciate.

The Doerner Institute, a research laboratory attached to Munich's
Pinakothek, is using a computer system similar to the National
Gallery's to measure accurately the damage done to pictures in
transit.  By comparing scans of a painting's "Craquelure"--
the network of hairline cracks that covers its surface--before and
after it is moved, the institute can see if the cracks have multiplied
or lengthed.  An early trial of a painting, taken on a 250-mile road
trip in a car, showed that even a properly packed picture gets lots of
new cracks when it is moved.  The institute plans to publish its
findings in October.

If anyone would like a full copy of this article, let me know.

--------------------Michael.Willett@OFFICE.Wang.com------------------