Viewing a painting on your computer is nothing at all like viewing an actual painting. Pictures you have seen a thousand times printed in a book or online can take your breath away when you see the real thing in a gallery. We knew that we could not recreate the experience you'd get in a real world gallery, so we decided to take advantage of what computers do best.

Every image in our galleries has been optimized for viewing on the computer, but we took it a step further. Old paintings suffer from the dimming of their colors and their alteration due to changes in the canvas itself. Color prints in books can suffer additional color quality loss as the pages of the book yellow. Since old books are an important resource for providing source material to scan from, this can make for images that are very different from what the original painting or illustration looked like. Many of the original photographs also suffer from color shifts (a lot of green in an image might cause yellows to become greenish looking). Take a quick look on the Internet for classic paintings and you'll see a lot of them that look grayish, faded, yellowish, or have other color problems. They are clearly not what the artists intended.

Some of the images in our galleries may be ones that you have seen before, but you may be surprised at how much brighter and cleaner the colors are. Every one has gone through digital image processing (dynamic range extension, color balance, color channel correction, sharpening, brightness and contrast), to attempt to restore them to what we believe is a close approximation of the original look. Of course, it is a guess, and it is impossible to get the colors exactly right without seeing the original and researching the methods used to create the original painting. Even then, the differences from monitor to monitor would defeat any attempt at true color fidelity. 

The images in our gallery are clearly superior to the original image we started with, though, as the examples below demonstrate. Just click on them to see the color correction take place. These are small images- the effects are much more noticeable in the full sized images in the gallery- but we think this will give you a good idea of what we mean.

We also used line removal and scratch removal features to get rid of cracks, repainted in some damaged areas, and did whatever we could to make the image appear as close to what we thought the original would have looked like. The two bottom images show details from the full image. Look closely at the horizontal defects in the image bottom left near the bottom of the image (especially along the foreground character's hip) and the vertical defects in the image bottom right.
 
 

The final piece of the puzzle is compression. JPEG is the standard way to compress a picture, but too much compression can leave areas of an image looking blocky. Too little compression and the file size of the picture is too big. Paint programs save to standard JPEG, but we ran all of the images through special software that uses dynamically increased compression on areas of low detail and less compression on areas of high detail, resulting in significantly smaller file sizes at much higher quality than a standard JPEG.