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.
Agreed. I absolutely adore the idea of it! But all the brownish colours tell the same story.
For some additional context; many old pigments were not stable at all.
https://www.vangoghstudio.com/what-were-the-original-colors-...
Is there enough color data left in the brown to correct it?
Or do you need to infer it based on location, budget, time, climate etc?
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.
Its absolutely lossy and you'd have to know a lot about each piece to know how big the loss is.
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).
hundreds of years of oxidation will make everything brown.
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...
I would like to know that formula also. this can be an interesting tool to reveal true colors of paintings as the painters intended...
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.
> is because of dirty & old oxidised varnish
And the pigments fade. And even worse, they fade at various rates and some are almost completely gone.
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
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-wh... cited by https://bsky.app/profile/ellipticalnight.bsky.social/post/3m...
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.
So we can use AI or even deterministic algorithms to recover the original palette.
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.
Honey, get used to it :)
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.