Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)

A colleague of mine made this very nice way to explore the (often) high resolution images from their collection:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rijkscollection.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rijkscollection.net&#x2F;</a><p>Highly recommended and easy to fall into a “rijkscollection hole” for a bit :)

I worked at this museum a few decades ago on a contract job, it was cool to walk around among so much history. Though I never really could appreciate the &quot;old masters&quot; from the Dutch Golden Age. Their work was part art and part record-keeping for which nowadays we have photography and video. The subject of many of these works are stuffy rich people posing for the &quot;family album&quot;. Artfully done yes but boring subjects in my personal opinion.<p>I did like some of the landscape views though. But overall I&#x27;m more into modern art where the art and the message is the only goal.<p>One of the things special to me about the night watch is that it&#x27;s huge in real life which I never really appreciated before I saw it. In contrast, the Mona Lisa at the Louvre was disappointingly tiny.

Oh wow, that is so cool. I thought I was at max zoom, normal blurry tiles. Then BOOM! It came into focus and I saw tiny cracks, smallest areas of paint, no loss of clarity. It&#x27;s like you&#x27;re standing right up next to it. That&#x27;s incredible! Wow, all I can say. That&#x27;s insane, that is totally insane!<p>I would love if there were a depthmask or something and a synthetic &quot;keylight&quot; feature you could drag around to really get an idea of the textures, the peaks and valleys. I guess we&#x27;ll have that in a future version. This is incredible.

An older, lower resolution image (11206 × 9320 pixels) can be downloaded here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rijksmuseum.nl&#x2F;en&#x2F;search&#x2F;objects?q=nachtwacht&amp;p=1&amp;ps=12&amp;st=Objects&amp;ii=0#&#x2F;SK-C-5,0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rijksmuseum.nl&#x2F;en&#x2F;search&#x2F;objects?q=nachtwacht&amp;p=...</a><p>To avoid the dumb mandatory account login, just use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugmenot.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;rijksmuseum.nl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugmenot.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;rijksmuseum.nl</a> . It worked just now (so be nice and leave it working).<p>Despite the ill-advised mandatory account (really, what&#x27;s up with that?), the Rijksmuseum is providing a better service than the neighbouring Van Goghmuseum, which refuses to share anything but low resolution photos of Vincent van Gogh&#x27;s works. Public museums are supposed to be custodians of culture, not IP owners.

Those 100MP digital medium format cameras are the most exciting tech in photography of the whole 21st century as far as I’m concerned.<p>For my “serious” photography work I shoot medium&#x2F;large format film, and every digital camera has left me non plussed. I may be a little obsessive about image quality, but what’s the point of dropping $5k on a setup that gives worse results than a wooden box and a sheet of film?<p>Then I got the Fuji GFX100 (the Hassy was a little out of my range :-) and… wow. Totally different ball game. I can finally produce digital images that rival film scans.<p>Seeing what museums have been doing with them has been super cool.

For anyone interested in technical aspects of this, I recommend watching Pycon talk [1] from Robert Erdmann. I bookmarked this couple of years ago.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=z_hm5oX7ZlE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=z_hm5oX7ZlE</a>

&gt; an error of even 1&#x2F;8 mm in the placement of the camera would result in a useless image.<p>That doesn’t make sense to me. Presumably part of the image stitching process is aligning the images to each other based on the areas they overlap, so why do they need that much precision in the camera placement? I’d think keeping the camera square to the painting would be important to minimize needing to skew the images, but that doesn’t seem to be what they’re talking about.

I am literally standing in the museum, looking at night watch as this moment, and saw this post. Legend.

The Rijksmuseum is on my top 5 list of museums I&#x27;ve ever visited, along with the Vatican Museum, the Louvre, the Met and the Uffizzi.<p>There are a lot more interesting works in there including Vermeer, other Rembrandt works, Pieter DeHooch, Rubens, the whole golden era of Dutch Renaissance...<p>Since you&#x27;re in Amsterdam already save some time to visit the VanGogh Museum, very close to Rijksmuseum.<p>And since you&#x27;re in Netherlands already save some time to go to Den Hag (the Hague) to visit the Maritius Huis museum and the cool M.C. Escher museum.

Not sure if off topic, but this German TV ad did a creative recreation of the painting that I found amusing as a Dutch person: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=c6XQXhr7LQM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=c6XQXhr7LQM</a>

Related:<p>Most detailed ever photograph of The Night Watch goes online (125 comments) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23151934">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23151934</a><p>Ultra High Resolution Photo of Night Watch (2022) (40 comments) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29778166">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29778166</a>

There&#x27;s something oddly satisfying in that you keep zooming in impressively close, and the image remains clean and non blurry.

To be honest I don&#x27;t understand the obsession about documenting things that are done to the painting. Going through that section of the museum I felt like the curators cared more about showcasing their efforts to store the painting than the painting itself.

Feels like you could make a fun game out of guessing where in the image you in the most zoomed in level.

This is good, but I wish they would allow for more than 1:1 zoom in. 1:1 pixels on a 4k display are too small, I&#x27;d like to be able to zoom in more than that.

&gt; To create this huge image, the painting was photographed in a grid with 97 rows and 87 columns with our 100-megapixel Hasselblad H6D 400 MS camera.<p>Looks like they had the ability to move the camera precisely to one of 97x87 grid positions. I wonder if they had any headroom in the precision of that movement. Could they have used a lower resolution but much cheaper camera and compensated by taking, say, a 200x200 grid of images instead?

Rembrandt did not work in this resolution so i think zoomed in it will just be a bunch of random noise.

First time I visited the Rijksmuseum I was of course excited to see the night watch. I found it on a side wall, 20x15 cm and was really surprised. I was expecting something more grandiose.<p>But never mind, I love paintings from that era so I went on admiring the others.<p>At some point I was in the middle of the central corridor and it then hit me... Wow.<p>Before getting to the main part of the museum, there were two temporary exhibitions. One was about doll houses and the other was about the activities (work) on a 17th century ship.<p>The latter was amazing. I was traumatized by the surgeon work, and his 5 tools... 5 tools to handle all injuries - how happy I am too live in France in the 21st century

Very vaguely related to image detail but you know what similarly impressed the heck out of me:<p>you know that first ever imaging of a black hole using telescopes across the globe and even the poles to make the signal gathering as wide as possible?<p>well that telescope (interferometer) could also image a TENNIS BALL on the MOON<p>(in perspective currently 5 meters is the best resolution of the moon we have and they only get like one or two photons back when they bounce a laser off that mirror the astronauts left there)<p>So are we going to enter an era where we can get ten more times out of existing telescopes with exponentially better sensors?

Whenever I see this image, or read bout it, I instantly want to listen to the great song by Ayreon, inspired by it:<p>&quot;The Shooting Company Of Captain Frans B. Cocq&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=oVlSARPr9Y0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=oVlSARPr9Y0</a><p>Funny coincidence - only this morning I watched a documentary about how they used machine learning to reconstruct the destroyed parts of the painting.

This is why it always pays to do your best work down to the smallest detail.<p>You never know if, 400 years later, people are going to invent a way to examine it atom by atom.

Direct link to image: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hyper-resolution.org&#x2F;view.html?pointer=0.375,0.000&amp;r=0.0000,0.0403,1.0000,0.8378&amp;i=Rijksmuseum&#x2F;SK-C-5&#x2F;SK-C-5_VIS_20-um_2019-12-21" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hyper-resolution.org&#x2F;view.html?pointer=0.375,0.000&amp;r...</a>

This page is a bit better, and lets you zoom to the pixel level (they say):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rijksmuseum.nl&#x2F;en&#x2F;stories&#x2F;operation-night-watch?filter=Photography" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rijksmuseum.nl&#x2F;en&#x2F;stories&#x2F;operation-night-watch?...</a>

I’ve built a website which will show you a random object from the massive Rijksmuseum collection. Always nice to find something you’ve never seen before!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;randomrijks.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;randomrijks.com</a>

Fascinating to see how the paint cracked. I zoomed in around the faces of the three men on the bottom right hand side and there are light areas on their faces with few cracks and dark areas with lots of cracks, eg around the noses. I wonder what caused that.

I worked with several imaging and computer vision people at the rijksmuseum, including authors of this project. This team is actually extremely competent and professional. Usually surprising for governmental institutions, but this one is ace.

I spent ages looking at this painting, and I still can&#x27;t find commander vimes.

I used to have it as a full wall wallpaper in the living room where I was growing up.

Related to it, there is a company doing that for microscopy. Did an internship once there<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gallery.ramonaoptics.com&#x2F;gallery" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gallery.ramonaoptics.com&#x2F;gallery</a>

reminds me of microsoft seadragon&#x2F;photosynth<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Seadragon_Software" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Seadragon_Software</a>

This is a remarkable complement to seeing a work of art in person. We can get close through zoom in ways that we couldn&#x27;t at the museum without putting the piece at risk.

This is cool! We visited the Rijksmuseum while they were doing the photography: automated but still painstaking work.

It&#x27;s a pdf, you can zoom in as much as you want? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usenix.org&#x2F;system&#x2F;files&#x2F;1311_05-08_mickens.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usenix.org&#x2F;system&#x2F;files&#x2F;1311_05-08_mickens.pdf</a>

Shortly after the painting was completed it was cropped so that it would fit on the wall. See if you can guess which edge was the victim.<p>Of the high resolution image itself... I teach painting and regularly use such images as teaching aids. I honesty belive that they have as much teaching value (or even more) than seeing the real thing. The details of paint applicationare magnificently clear in such images.

That’s quite well-done!<p>Much faster than most of these types of sites.

Did we just take down the website?

<i>Using artificial intelligence</i><p>No thanks