Tech meets art

Covid (no, this is not another covid story and how we muddled through, on the contrary) inspired us to go and see more art. On a distance, which was great in a Museum like The Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. No sweating art lovers rubbing your arms and breathing in your neck. Let alone smell their garlic breaths from the poor, uber expensive Amsterdam 4 star restaurant that should actually deserve 2 stars on Google. Obviously it was take-out on their hotel room. But non of that. Space and room to manoeuvre around the timeless art in all its glory.

Coming back from that field trip I felt revived and inspired. The amount of art that is thrown at you by Van Gogh is almost overwhelming. His utter believe in color and how to portrait it on canvas almost brought him to the brink of insanity. Or did he topple over? He knew he was right about how colors could be used on canvas but as is the case with innovators like Van Gogh, no one took him very serious during his lifetime. When he died, his brother took great care of all his paintings and after his passing (quite soon after Vincent) Theo’s wife stepped up and made sure the paintings stayed within the family for a great deal. Resulting in the magnificent collection that’s on display in Amsterdam.

Back to the inspiration. We welcomed a new intern, Levi, after that inspired summer and he was intrigued by the idea to create a website dedicated to the color useage by Van Gogh. As most youngsters are, he was completely oblivious to any of the works by Van Gogh and had no idea where to start. But after going through the material( I took a lot of pictures during our visit to the museum on my smartphone which meant we had enough inspiration to work with) he got really excited and inspired. We were still pondering over the fact how we would be able to create something useable and put this into a web environment. Writing the text for the website was not what Levi signed up for. His metier is front-end (what you see when looking at a website) and we had to find another way to set this up. Chatgtp had just been released and the whole team went berserk on it. Like fully addicted from search one. Anything they could enter, was entered resulting into a completely new way of approaching (commercial) web building, and speeding up processes. Next to Van Gogh and his work it became the inspiration for the complete website and everything that came after that. Art had just met Ai and they took off like the famous wildfire. Masterluts.com was born.

Back to Van Gogh. Was he right about his use of color? And his utter dedication to it? As a team of art enthousiasts and tech lovers we took a deep dive into color and the science behind it. And with science I mean, how to derive the color schemes used by Van Gogh and put this into a digital format that’s actually useable on your screen and later on print. And as you do in uncharted waters: you just start. We bundled all the paintings in groups with similar colors. It was amazing to see how he used the same color schemes on people, still-life and landscapes alike. He had no restrictions in themes across time. We came up with 8 groups of clearly defined ‘color-moods’ and started analysing the most dominant tints per group through Photoshop and creating basic color blocks. These blocks were set into a mathematic conversion resulting into a sum that we were able to inject into a basic standard color scheme that is used by all modern screens, computer programs etc. What came out was stunning sometimes. We tweaked it a little bit to average out the light differences to make it useable on modern screens, like your smartphone or laptop. All in all we shift the colors of your photo and rearrange them the way Van Gogh saw color in a specific painting and placed them into your photo or video where you can immediately see the result. We created an actual LUT or Look Up Table that is much used in video editing and photo grading. We inserted these on the website where you can see the difference and made them available to all users.

As is the case with Van Gogh, we also struggle to commercially offer this to potential users. But again Ai has helped us a lot and set up a complete campaign on how to actually offer this to the users. We never started this journey with a commercial mind. It was Van Gogh who inspired us, to rethink color, to look at skin tones, still-life, landscapes and starry nights. Over the years his paintings have become more and more inspirational and above all emotional. It’s a huge pleasure to see them in real life, and think of how they were made, the circumstances under which Van Gogh thrived and how he never experienced any of the popularity before he died. With what we now know by analysing his use of color we took a sneak peek into his brain, saw through his eyes and dove somewhat into his emotion. Color has been his driving force and it drove the whole planet to utterly love his paintings. Being able to reproduce this on your screen with your own images and videos has been a great team effort and journey. It has been amazing and revealing, it made us rethink and above all utterly love Van Gogh’ work and the mastermind behind it.

PS. this text has been completely written by hand, no Ai was used :-)