Artwork by Ray Downing
Russell Breault of the Turin Education Project said, “It’s human nature to always want to put a name with a face. The scripture gives us the name. The Shroud gives us the face.”
The highlight of the History Channel program “The real face of Jesus” was the work of Ray Downing and his team at Studio Macbeth in an effort to cull a human face from the image on the cloth. Ray and his team are some of the best computer graphics artists in the world, specializing in the creation of accurate and lifelike death masks of famous people.
Downing said,
When you look at the Shroud, you have the impression that it’s a picture, but it’s not a picture at all. It’s a database of information. If one were to single out one single thing about the Shroud of Turin which separates it from every other effort on the planet is that it encoded three dimensional information in a two dimensional surface.
Downing and his team meticulously studied the Shroud. They had to overcome a number of difficult issues that were unique to this assignment. For example, the cloth was very dirty, with copious marks of bloodstains overlaid on the image of the body and had to be cleaned. At one point Downing said to a coworker, “I think the solution [about the problem of separating the distortion of the image] to it is to realize the Shroud wasn’t hanging on a wall. It was wrapping a corpse.”
To separate the image of the man under the Shroud, bloodstains on the material had to be contrasted and highlighted in order to be digitally scrubbed from the body. A special raster algorithm known as Fast Fourier Transformation was used to mathematically eliminate the herringbone weave pattern in the fabric from the image. Every conceivable effort was made to produce an end result that was as accurate as possible, and the results were remarkable.
Downing traveled to meet with John Jackson, the lead scientist of STURP. Together they conducted experiments to better understand how distortions in the fabric altered the image. With the blood temporarily removed from the enshrouded face, the weave patterns in the fabric was found to also interfere with the extraction of the image. This problem was caused by stretch distortion naturally produced by a two dimensional surface of the fabric covering the three dimensional object, in this case a human face.
Ray Downing described the physical damage on the body that had been wrapped in the Shroud: “It looked like an automobile accident. That’s the best way I can describe it. It was devastating, vicious….that’s all you can say about it, vicious.”
Then Downing abruptly stopped speaking, seemingly overcome by emotion. The result of their efforts significantly cleaned up distortions in the three dimensional image projected from the Shroud. It provided the computer with sufficient information from which a head mold could be cast, which was equivalent to creating a death mask of Jesus.
The next step for Downing and his team was to take this death mask they had been able to create from the cleaned up three dimensional image and using a regular office scanner, load it back into the computer. Next, the three dimensional model of the death mask was overlaid with the computerized three dimensional projection extracted from the Shroud itself for comparison, and the two images matched perfectly, as the Shroud covered the death mask.
Artwork by Ray Downing
Finally, Downing brought his computerized image to life, colorized so that the skin, hair and blood looked quite realistic. The head slowly rotated and tilted upward. Then the eyes opened and blinked as light shone on the face, and that sent a chill down my spine.
Ray Downing would the first to concede that there is no way to assert with any certainty the image he composed using information obtained from the Shroud was the face of the crucified Christ. On the other hand, Downing seemed confident the image his team helped cull from the “database of information” on the Shroud was as accurate as the technology and their skills would allow, working under the assumption that the Shroud was the genuine article.
Was their effort all a waste of time? Did the Shroud ever cover the body of Jesus? Have Ray Downing and his team at Studio Macbeth accomplished the impossible, and given us the opportunity to see the real face of Jesus, two thousand years after his death and resurrection?
“Prince of Peace” by Akiane Kramarik
What is most interesting is to compare the efforts of Downing to the work of Akiane Kramarik titled Prince of Peace and note the uncanny similarities between them.
Dan Porter of the website ShroudStory.com said it best:
It’s hard to imagine a forger could have done this. The question is: why would he? Why create something that’s a negative with all these three dimensional attributes to it…unless somebody in the medieval period said, “Gee, I’ve got to fool somebody in the 21st century.”
Why indeed. Why would anyone go to all this trouble to create an elaborate hoax? It might make sense to do it for money, but where is the profit in it?
God only knows…
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