These artists recreated lost and destroyed artwork using Photoshop and stock images
Jun 28, 2016
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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Whether the work we create is digital, or a little more tangible, it’s an inevitable consequence that some of it will be lost or destroyed. In this short series of videos released by Adobe, we see four of them recreated using Photoshop and stock imagery.
Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee went missing in 1990 after thieves disguised as police officers broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and stole an eximated $500 million worth of paintings. In this video, we see it recreated digitally by digital artist Ankur Patar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQ-ZmQOEOoc
Patar was challenged by Adobe to make it look as close to the original as possible. The recreation required 247 images from Adobe’s stock library and took 20 days to complete.
Patar is not the only artist Adobe commissioned to recreate a masterpiece. Retoucher Karla Cordova was tasked with recreating Frida Kahlo’s The Wounded Table. While the original painting vanished in 1955, three photographs of the painting had been made between 1940 and 1944.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e8fEAm02vg
Jean‐Charles Debroize recreates our next masterpiece; Caravaggio’s Saint Matthew and the Angel, destroyed in 1945 while housed in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, now known as the Bode Museum, in Berlin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giR_ptgREpA
This last one has to be my favourite, recreated by digital artist Mike Campau. Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Cathedral Towering over a Town, destroyed by fire in 1931, is full of amazing intricate detail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug_OMlWuFL0
I can’t even begin to imagine what a headache just sourcing suitable images would be for something like this, let alone the amount of time and effort that obviously went into creating each of these within Photoshop.
So, admire the beauty, get inspiration for creating your own work, or let them give you motivation to better your Photoshop abilities, but watch the videos.
Have you ever tried recreating the work of others in this or a similar way? Let us know and show off your work in the comments.
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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2 responses to “These artists recreated lost and destroyed artwork using Photoshop and stock images”
I would love to see these printed out and displayed at their original size.
The videos are great but you can’t see all those hundreds of hours of effort in the same way that you can with a big print
We actually did print them at Adobe’s Creativity Conference, Max! They were gorgeous