A painting by Rembrandt entitled The Night Watch was digitized for free worldwide viewing. The resolution reaches 717 Gigapixel.
The Night Watch was painted by Rembrandt van Rijn in 1642, and its current storage location is at the Rijksmuseum, a museum of art and history in Amsterdam.
In order to be seen by more people, the painting was digitized. The tool used is the Hasselblad H6D MS camera which has a resolution of 100MP. Loh, but how come the total resolution can reach 717 Gigapixel? That's because this painting was not only photographed once, but 8,439 times.
Then the photos are 'stitched' using AI technology, and produce photos with a pixel count of up to 717 billion. The photo file size reaches 5.6 TB, as quoted by us from Techspot, Saturday (15/1/2022).
The digital photo of this painting is four times sharper than the digital version published in May 2020. In fact, this photo is the photo with the largest resolution in the world today, beating the Shanghai photo whose resolution is 'only' 195 gigapixels.
According to the museum, this very high-resolution photo allows researchers to study the painting from a distance. Especially in studying the effects of aging on paintings, because the resulting detail is very high.
Even more interesting, the digital photo of The Night Watch painting can be viewed for free by anyone on the museum's website.
The history of The Night Watch painting is quite interesting, because 300 years ago this painting had the edges cut off so that it could be mounted on a smaller wall.
In a restoration carried out in 2020, parts that were cut and then lost can be 'resurfaced' using AI. The Operation Night Watch project team spent two years photographing the painting 528 times which were then stitched, and AI was able to learn Rembrandt's painting style and create the missing piece based on a small painting by Gerrit Lundens.