If anything, it's actually MORE difficult to generate hands with an improper number of fingers. Apologies to Count Rugen.
Think in terms of hands, their components, and their function, and test again. Be specific.
You're also really talking to the wrong person about potential deficiencies in GenAI for images.
I run an entire site where I compare a multitude of prompts I CREATED to explicitly test state of the art major generative image providers (Imagen4, gpt-image-1, Flux Kontext, etc.) - I'm all too aware of their shortcomings.
While models have been trained to deliver high-level impressions (with increasing attention to detailed problem domains), one-shot control is still relatively poor, and they lack the fundamental skill of a trained artist. There are chasms between what you think you're prompting, what the text encoder understands, and how the model interprets that input, with the resulting effect of a professional musician intentionally playing badly... hands not excepted.
For instance, in "Mermaid Disciplinary Committee" on your site, every hand has a deformity or finger count inconsistency. In "Spheron", the hands have no variation and suffer from cross-subject cloning (even 4o - look at the shield-carrier).
That's what I meant about creativity and being specific. Try prompting for three people holding up certain fingers on one or both hands. Start with the index, progress to pinky. Ask it to show you a hand gripping things, rotated in different orientations. Prompt for a hand with 3 fingers, then 6 fingers, then no fingers. Ask for gang signs or shadow puppets, pinching something, with fewer or extra digits. The illusion breaks down quickly.
This is a space I'm working in, retraining text encoders and diffusion models to understand the same things first year arts students learn. With how limited and poisoned most models are, it's been a huge effort.
Here's another one, this tweeted image shows either six fingers or an abnormally large middle finger: https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1904602845221187829
Reminds me of when Karpathy tweeted about the founding of an educational AI lab:
Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1683/
Whatever digital record format they use, they will probably need to rewrite it once every few years to ensure that it's still readable.
> Kachkine acknowledges that, as with any restoration project, there are ethical issues to consider, in terms of whether a restored version is an appropriate representation of an artist’s original style and intent. Any application of his new method, he says, should be done in consultation with conservators with knowledge of a painting’s history and origins.
A sort of interesting thought, “what was the artist’s intent, should be recover the painting,” is a well known question nowadays. It would be sort of funny if current artists would just write down what sort of restoration plans they are ok with. I wonder how many would say “just do what you will do people can enjoy it.”
Although, one could argue maybe that the damage which occurs to artwork as it ages also tells a historical story. Perhaps that story doesn’t just belong to the artist, and so restoring the work could be questionable even with their permission. I’m sure this is well-trod ground.
The 'restoration' of the cistine chapel ceiling was funded by a Japanese tv company. The cheapest approach was chosen which assumed that michelangelo made absolutely no corrections to his fresco using applied paint. It is perfectly obvious that this was a mistaken assumption, in the process removing many of the artists original work. I can upload some slides later if anyone is interested.
In victorian times many classic sculptures were scrubbed of their original paint and their stonework bleached, just in order to serve the tastes of the time.
And let us not forget that modern conservators will add or remove elements according to the clients taste. Eg change the flag of a ship from British to American.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_(Garc%C3%ADa_Mart%C3...
> The restoration is printed on a very thin polymer film, in the form of a mask that can be aligned and adhered to an original painting. It can also be easily removed. Kachkine says that a digital file of the mask can be stored and referred to by future conservators, to see exactly what changes were made to restore the original painting.
I wonder whether it's still worthwhile to replaced a yellowed varnish varnish on old painting, just to be sure that it doesn't degrade further (with the assumption that historical varnish are somewhat lesser than modern one, which I really don't know if it's the case).
Makes me wonder how it would handle heavy impasto tho.
Otherwise this might be an interesting technique, if the result can match the color and texture of paint perfectly. I can see it being used for some low priority paintings. There are much more paintinga that need restoration than people with necessary skills, so this could save of them, as it will be more viable to fix them. The infilling is usually just a small part of the entire process, but usually the most difficult wrt how skillful the conservator must be. You must be able to match colors and style perfectly, and there are huge differences in how fast this process is depending on the skills of the painter.
I would say that we should just live with the difference. There is a near guarantee that our experience of paintings as they exist today will always be significantly different to how they would have been experienced when they had been made, regardless of what we do. The factors are:
- Yellowing of oil/pigment/varnish. This is pretty much inevitable, even in modern paints.
- Fugitive colors. Most high-color pigments tended to fade significantly over time. Degas was once seen crying in front of a Delacroix, upset at how badly the colors had faded, even in his lifetime (It might have been Manet... can't locate the relevant anecdote online).
- Excessive varnishing. It used to be so that paintings received regular varnishing by their owners. Over time, the layers of varnish would build up to a ridiculous degree.
- Lighting. For me this is probably the most annoying factor. A general rule is that paintings should be lighted in the same light that they were painted. The values go to hell if a painting is lighted too brightly. There are many so-called hanging experts, who always light too strongly, even in respected national collections.
Semi-related anecdote: The first time I went to the Rodin museum I was struck by how badly one of the busts had been lighted. Whilst the guards were not looking, I moved it to a more agreeable position. I came back one year later to find it was still in that position.
As for using modern varnishes... I am not expert, but AFAIK one factor that accounts for the amazing longevity of old paintings was the compatibility between their many layers. The canvas, the primer, the paint and the medium were all derived from the same plant: flax. On top of that would sometimes be laid stand oil, again derived from flax. If this continuity is broken, all manner of problems might arise, most of which would be long term issues such as cracking and flaking.
AFAIK that's largely untrue in the general case:
- Canvas painting only appeared in the 15th century, and took a while to spread, paintings before the 17th century (16th in some locations) tend to be on wood panels e.g. raphael and da vinci painted almost exclusively on board.
- Canvas is almost always coated with gesso which at the time would use rabbitskin glue as binder, no flax there.
- While flaxseed was the most common drying oil (in europe), walnut, poppyseed, and safflower, were also in use. And additives were usually mixed in to manage the viscosity of the paint, so even in the "best" case it's not like the paint would be just pigments in linseed oil unless it's a very early oil painting, which wouldn't have been on canvas.
- As for varnishes, not only was flax not the only drying oil for oil varnishes, varnishes could also be "spirit" varnishes (with a resin dissolved into a solvent like alcohol or turpentine), waxes were also sometimes used as or in varnishes.
The longevity of murals is easy to account for: the paint is applied to wet plaster, in that way becoming part of the wall. That is why the murals of Pompeii survived.
> Canvas is almost always coated with gesso which at the time would use rabbitskin glue as binder, no flax there.
You are right about the rabbit skin glue, but wrong about the gesso. As I recal, traditional Gesso is a mix of glue plus titanium white powder and is very brittle, generally unsuited to a flexible support such as canvas. A canvas painter would more likely use something flexible like a mix of pigment and rabbit skin glue, or pigment and egg protein or pigment and oil.
I thank god for modern primers. Using modern primers, I can prime a canvas in two days. An oil based oil primer could take months to dry.
* Gypsum (Hydrated calcium sulfate)
* Zinc white pigment
* Clean tap water or distilled water
* Rabbit skin glue
—-
[1] Cennini, Cennino d'Andrea, The Craftsman's Handbook "Il Libro dell Arte," Daniel V. Thompson, Jr., trans. (New York: Dover Publications, 1960) pp. 69–74.
That made me think of the old German sketch "das Bild haengt shief" (the picture is askew): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6WQaIIZ248
I hope you left the rest of the exposition standing.
Another anecdote: I was once photographing a painting in a museum gallery that did not encourage Phtography. Unfortunately, the light was causing excessive glare. Whilst the guards were not looking, we placed a cigarette package out of view under the frame to lift it away from the glare. Again... upon return many months later the cigarette package was still there.
I should state that this was a very provisional museum. It had recently been painted, and there were drops of paint of the frames showing that the paintings had not been removed during the painting.
I am!
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/wseunftjggoiqekn43hr1/paintin...
The relevant slides are on pages 16 to 19. Though I don't explicitly state it, most of the key changes Michelangelo made to his fresco were to its neighboring regional contrast. This is defined here:
https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/pages/structural-...
As you might guess, neighboring regional contrast acts upon neighboring regions. Artists manipulate this property to produce tone wrap, which heightens the impression of form. Tone wrap is also defined in the preceding link.
Additionally, all Michelangelo's glazes were also removed. These would have had a significant impact on the global unity of his composition. I can barely look at photos of the Cistine Chapel taken after the restoration.
To my layman's understanding, the current logic of conservation is:
1. clean. dust, grime, soot, tar, and other environmental deposits don't belong on the painting and have little value
2. stabilise, this is mostly for paintings which are actively degrading (e.g. paint is lifting), this can also include repairs to the substrate e.g. patch up tears in the canvas
3. fill-in losses
The last one is the one that has some contention, and what TFA is about (and only a portion of it to boot), and the idea behind it is (again to my understanding) that at the end of the day art is for the living to appreciate, and while damage can be of some historical interest it generally detracts from enjoyment of the piece and is (usually) not part of the original vision.
However it is of course subject to (0). do not damage what remains, so the retouching should be well separated from the original material in order to be identifiable and removable without risk of further damage in case re-conservation is needed, or better conservation methods can be used.
And then if you allow for (3) arises the question of limit, is there and if so what is the point at which it doesn't make artistic sense to try and replace losses even if somebody's paying for it, and it is better to accept the piece's new state of being as its normal?
3d printing impasto does sound cool as a tool for restoration of topographically scanned originals.
contravariant•6mo ago
dmurray•6mo ago
There's probably some other grant money they can get down the line for a completely AI-less process, but obviously there's a lot more funding for AI than for art restoration.
crooked-v•6mo ago
It's also worth noting that this doesn't help with the first half of most restorations, which is removing crud and wear and often painstakingly undoing previous alterations or low-quality restorations. There's actually a pretty long history of paintings being altered to fit current fashions or otherwise mucked with in ways that make modern art historians cringe.
masklinn•6mo ago
ryandrake•6mo ago
kulahan•6mo ago
glimshe•6mo ago