As an "expert viewer" of Baumgartner Restoration, this site usefulness is questionable. If you look at those color palettes, most of them brownish that is because of dirty & old oxidised varnish. These are not the intended look of these paintings. So these color palettes has nothing to do with those 3000 masters.
It was short but I really enjoyed this little thread this morning, added much color to my life!
> Starting in the Renaissance, artists made sculpture and architecture that exalted form over color, in homage to what they thought Greek and Roman art had looked like. In the eighteenth century, Johann Winckelmann, the German scholar who is often called the father of art history, contended that “the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is,” and that “color contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty.” When the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were first excavated, in the mid-eighteenth century, Winckelmann saw some of their artifacts in Naples, and noticed color on them. But he found a way around that discomfiting observation, claiming that a statue of Artemis with red hair, red sandals, and a red quiver strap must have been not Greek but Etruscan—the product of an earlier civilization that was considered less sophisticated. He later concluded, however, that the Artemis probably was Greek. (It is now thought to be a Roman copy of a Greek original.) Østergaard and Brinkmann believe that Winckelmann’s thinking was evolving, and that he might eventually have embraced polychromy, had he not died in 1768, at the age of fifty, after being stabbed by a fellow-traveller at an inn in Trieste
Man, what a line. What a horror, this projection of opinion! From the "Father of Art History"! To rob the world so! I feel this way all the time, that anti-sentiment, that the pure marble world just stately and so is art and perfection, over the colors of the universe & it's possibility!
> "the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is"
This should make your blood run cold, imo. A world locked in amber view of reality, static, sedate. Whew.
This specific painting was reinterpreted based on specific descriptions of the colours in a letter from the painter.
As far as I'm aware there is no way to know for sure what colours originally looked like, especially if the information is limited. There are so many variables, we can only guess.
This is a very interesting perspective. I'd thought the muted, brownish colors in these paintings had to do with the quality and availability of pigments during that period.
There's most likely multiple aspects at play: high-chroma pigments were historically limited and/or expensive; varnish yellowed over time; pigments faded. The digitization process probably wasn't perfect as well (I'd expect modern scans should be fairly good though).
so is there a formula that can be automatically applied to restore the original colors? at least some reasonable approximation, based on the painting's age?
I seriously doubt it. Degradation would be in some part related to the conditions the painting was held in, which would be nearly impossible to backtrack outside of one-off case studies. Imagine a painting that was stuck in a room full of smoke -- or was put on some less than good backing paper/framing.
There has been some research on what causes degradation on paper/pigment but as far as I know much of it ends up as a mystery, a fact of time...
It’s the colours you will see today when looking at the paintings, however. Your point is valid, but even the somewhat "chromatically degraded" versions of many of these are gorgeous.
An additional problem is that it looks like the colors are from the intersection of 3 random paintings.
The masters already picked their colors on one painting. If you randomly average them it is like a kid mixing finger paints.
You aren't going to get a better color scheme from 3 random masterworks.
A few points on how a painter's intentions do not always align with how we see their work many years later:
Generally, a painting is best viewed and photographed in as close a lighting environment as it was painted. I have seen many paintings 'blasted' by unnaturally bright gallery lights. There is a reason why a gallery lighting designer is a real job. However, in my experience effective gallery lighting designers are as rare as rocking horse shit.
It is true that the paint the artists applied many years ago will often bear little resemblance to that which we now see. This is less true of earth browns and very true of paintings done at the beginning of the pigment revolution, when wonderful colors were produced which were later discovered to be very 'fugitive'. However, the relative relationship between these paints remains more or less intact, and IMHO this is the most important factor in aesthetic evaluation.
Another factor is how a photo flattens such differences as rough vs smooth (and their consequent light reflection properties). In a Titian painting, huge areas are untouched rough red oxide primer on rough canvas, vs the slight gloss of oil paint. Importantly, old masters would often apply their lights as (smooth) thick paint and their dark as thin glazes (or scumbles) above a thin primer (red or green or yellow ochre or whatever). The frisson between these layers gave the darks their depth that they would otherwise have lacked. This is mastery of dynamic range at its finest. Googles art project photos comes close to capturing this. For an example, check out any portrait by Durer in Google art project.
It‘s vibecoded slop that turned an idea that should have stayed a bad idea into poor execution, convincing the vibecoder that the idea is validated. The vibe coder has absolutely no domain specific knowledge to understand what you picked up in a second, yet no AI ever mentioned that, they didn’t learn, and instead reinforced their bias by producing another piece of forgettable slop.
Yes, I’m fun at parties.
But seriously. I am not against ai slops in general, people explore what’s possible to make. But I don’t really appreciate them at Show HN - there should be a new thread for ai-made or -assisted projects, or there should be a disclosure in project description.
Agreed. I created plenty of sloppy but useful personal one-page tools with Claude myself. Faster than googling them most of the time. The problem is when you get convinced they‘re good enough to present them this way.
Is that a question? Because that doesn't follow at all. 2 different pigments with different colors could fade to the same color and be indistinguishable from looking at them now, without analyzing the chemical composition.
I took a class at his workshop in Tokyo and highly recommend the experience. So much thought and detail goes into preparing the wood blocks and even into "just" printing them.
I've switched my work laptop from W10 to Fedora about 9 months ago, using KDE during this time. The past month switched to Niri + DMS and I'm extremely happy, which is odd to say. I've a stacked external monitor setup 2 x 4k monitors on top of each other. Top one is the main, runs mostly just the IDE. The bottom one with 7 named workspaces:
- chat: teams / discord
- work: assisting workspace for Main screen
- git : sourcegit
- terminal: for general terminal stuff
- claudecode
- work related browsing
- personal browsing
All workspaces are accessible their own hotkey, so I can work on something on the main, and instantly switch to a specific application. I had the exact setup with KDE, but I had to do some trickery to get this working with Virtual Desktops Only on Primary Display https://store.kde.org/p/2143363. Niri enables to have the same setup, + display independent workspace setup which I really wanted. The same feature was requested 20! years ago in KDE, and we still don't have it. This kinda shows the power of independent projects like Hyprland and Niri.
I find it comical that OpenAI with all the power of CharGPT even them are unable to release an app for both iOS and Android at the same time. Wow, good marketing for Codex.
Or Sama's documented reverence for Apple products. We are talking about the guy who sold Tim Cook his AI for $0.00, he's not exactly got the horse drawing the cart here.
The Fusion360 free-tier has been getting ever more restrictive over time. At the moment it is at:
> users who generate less than $1,000 USD in annual revenue and use for home-based, non-commercial projects only.
Which already makes it unsuitable for any Open Source work. While one might still accept those restrictions for quick one-off projects, those projects are also the ones that FreeCAD can handle fine.
I do a lot in amateur rocketry and took the fusion360 route. One thing that’s nice about it is its popularity. Whenever I have questions most of the other people in my hobby are ready with answers or guidance.
https://www.youtube.com/@BPSspace has a video on this exact topic, but can't seem to find it. I pretty sure he mentioned that there is a publicly open book on guidance and navigation.
I'm a hobbyist who has used PS for 20 something years now. My issue with Affinity Photo is that you can use 85% of your PS knowledge and workflow, everything is the same but that last 15% is awfully, unlogically different and will drive you mad. That last 15% feels like it was made by people who do not understand why PS does things the way it does. Meanwhile my statement cannot be true, because Affinity nailed the firat 85%, but just cannot comprehend why they couldn't copy the last 15%.
The keyboard actions alone are maddening. Trying to switch tools, exit a text editing mode, change tool properties, all can be very frustrating to do with the keyboard.
https://youtube.com/@baumgartnerrestoration
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