2024 - 717 billion pixels: a Rembrandt painting becomes the largest "photo" in history

Through the magic of high-resolution photography, a painting by Rembrandt, The Night Watch, has been digitized to give an image of 717 @ nbsp; billion pixels! It is, to date, the biggest snapshot ever taken.

For posterity and for the technical feat, there are challenges that some do not hesitate to take up. Thus, since 2019, a team mandated by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (Netherlands) has been working to reproduce a very (but really very) high definition digital copy of a painting by the famous painter Rembrandt.

A record-breaking 717 gigapixel shot

The specialists were busy around the De compagnie van kapitein Frans Banning Cocq en luitenant Willem van Ruytenburgh maakt zich gereed om uit te walken, or more simply By Nachtwacht (The Night Watch), a 4 x 3 m painting painted in 1642, and did a titanic job to produce a final image of 717 billion pixels (717 gigapixels)!

To do this, they assembled and processed 8,439 5.5 x 4.1 cm images made using one (or more) Hasselblad H6D-400c MS. This 100-megapixel medium-format (53 x 40 mm) SLR, launched in 2018 at … € 40,000, was ideal since it is mainly intended for the reproduction of works of art.

8,439 images assembled for a final weight of 5.6 TB

It is not only a question of taking pictures of each end of the canvas, it is also necessary to calculate your shot to achieve the best possible result. According to the museum, the distance between each pixel is 5 micrometers (0.005 millimeters). Each point would therefore be smaller than a blood cell. It leaves you wondering … By zooming in the image, you can observe the smallest details of the painting, the colors, or even the passage of time on the canvas.

Once the 8,439 photos were meticulously assembled using treatments using artificial intelligence, the technicians obtained an image weighing 5.6 TB! In other words, you would need the storage space of several dozen “classic” smartphones to store such a file.

As of May 2020, the Rijksmuseum had already posted a first high-resolution version of the image, but it was “only” 44.8 gigapixels. In addition to technical progress, such a photograph allows art historians and restorers to deepen their knowledge.