Wednesday, May 25, 2016

[vrvxntbf] Vector art versus photograph

Painting, or generically 2D art, used to be the only way to record the appearance of a scene or person.  It has become obsoleted by photography.

However, digital vector art has an advantage over photography in that it can be rendered at arbitrarily high resolution and not look "wrong" (for some aesthetic measure of "wrong").  Edges remain sharp.  At worst, it only looks boring at high magnification.

Photographs look pixelated or weirdly interpolated at high magnification.  Fancy interpolation between pixels of a raster photograph could get good results, but it requires computer vision and AI to figure out where the sharp edges should be.

Perhaps someday a hybrid: spline surfaces constructed among rasterized samples in color space on broad regions with sharp vector clipping.

Inspired by, why would anyone commission a portrait these days?  Only if it is digital vector art.

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