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 … [Read more...]
The real face of Jesus, part 2
What is the Shroud of Turin? What does it mean? Photographer Barrie Schwortz of STURP (Shroud of Turin Research Project) describes the Shroud as "religion and science living on the same piece of cloth." And he should know; Schwortz spent five days in 1978 working as a principal photographer documenting the efforts as part of the Shroud of Turin Research Project that was led by physicist John Jackson, who worked for NASA in the 1970s. When Jackson ran a photograph of the Shroud of Turin through a VP-8 digital analyzer (a specialized computer typically used to map three dimensional simulation models from two dimensional images) at NASA, the remarkable result of his experiment led to the commission of the STURP (Shroud of Turin Research Project) team. Jackson's test culled a three dimensional image from the two dimensional photograph...and no other painting or work of art has ever reproduced such a phenomenon. Only photographs of three dimensional objects can produce that same effect. The test result clearly indicated that the fabric had once been used to wrap a three dimensional object, which in this case was the dead body of a human being, believed to be none other than Jesus, the Christ. No matter what else might be said or written, this religious artifact will always have doubts about it veracity and authenticity due to the lack of a clear chain of custody and the now controversial results of carbon dating tests. Like any other religious artifact, the fact that it exists cannot be offered as irrefutably proof of the existence of God, because proof does not … [Read more...]
