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...]