Modelling the Shroud of Turin with white flour, olive oil and a real face – in pictures.

Site banner: see how a simulated sweat imprint (my wet hand pressed down onto dark fabric) responds magnificently to 3D-rendering computer software (ImageJ) before and after tone-reversal (negative back to positive image). Remind you of anything? Like those supposedly “unique”  and “encoded” 3D-properties of the Shroud of Turin body image? For a more realistic aged/yellowed sweat imprint, see the many postings on this site since 2014 obtained with the aid of my Model 10 (imprinting off  parts, notably head and hands, of a real body (mine!) onto linen with white wheaten flour, followed by heat-development of the image to generate carbon-based and thus bleachable straw-coloured melanoidins via Maillard reactions between wheat proteins and reducing sugars). 

 

By popular demand, here’s the result of using my flour imprinting model on a real human face, well, my own…

We’ll let the photos tell their own  story, postponing  the discussion for Comments (mainly), though as before, I might tack additions onto this posting  later in the light of comments, further thoughts or both.

Yes, this site and its content, started some 4 years ago, should be seen as a work in progress. All findings are preliminary, all conclusions are tentative.

To business: here are the results from today’s experimentation, dare one say model building:

 

Here’s a piece of thick expanded polystyrene. A hole has been inexpertly cut out. The purpose is to allow me to imprint my own flour-coated face onto TAUT linen that goes under the chin, so as to stand a better chance of imprinting the nose, lips and chin. (The nose has previously been an obstacle to complete imprinting off a fully 3D human face, as distinct from ‘soft option’ bas relief).

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Here’s the wet linen spread out across the cut out region of polystyrene, ready to receive a flour-coated face. The linen will be gripped at the sides, closer to the bottom than the top, to ascertain whether nose AND lips AND chin can be simultaneously imprinted. (Yes, I pushed my face into the linen before taking this picture, as a dry, correction, wet run).

Here’s a late addition to the photo gallery, This afterthought was prompted by what seemed like a beard on the final imprint. Here it’s not at all difficult to see how imprinting onto the semi-transparent water-soaked linen, stretched taut like a drum skin (or maybe allowed a little slackness and sag to allow limited moulding to 3D relief)),  should produce an entirely artefactual beard and possibly moustache too. Indeed, this prediction was made on this site many moons ago, suggesting there was a ” face pressed up against the glass” quality to the TS image that could have made the facial “hair” of the Man on the TS an imprinting artefact. Note too how the technique can generate trapped creases that subsequently get ‘baked in’ (see prominent one on TS at chin/neck level).

That’s me on the left, with face first smeared with olive oil, then dusted with plain white flour. Can you see the difference on the right? The flour is missing in places – most places in fact except the lower relief. Why? Because the picture was taken AFTER pressing my face down into the wet linen, stretched over the polystyrene cut out.

Here’s the oil/flour imprinted linen, suspended in a hot fan oven (up to 200 degrees C). Note the browning of the imprinted regions. Note that it’s not necessary to have the linen stretched out.

Here’s the initial ‘raw’ imprint of my face, prior to washing to achieve that fuzzier attenuated TS look. No, it does not look immediately promising, but bear in mind that the primary aim in this experiment was to achieve imaging of the lower half of the face (nose, lips and chin). The eyes are ‘white space’, no attempt having been made to image the (closed) eyelids. But then the eyes are poorly imaged on the TS too, as expected from a contact-imprinting model – the eyes being recessed in the bony eye sockets.

 

Here’s the same image, after tone reversal and 3D rendering/enhancement in ImageJ. Nope, not King Neptune, but yours truly. I seem to have acquired a beard. Why is that one may ask? What about the ‘beard’ on the TS? Is that a real beard, or is that too an artefact of contact-imprinting? Discuss….

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Late addition (29th Jan): the technique of smearing oil onto the template was first introduced on this site way back in October 2014 when exploring direct scorching from heated metal templates. As soon as the idea arrived that a cold template could  be used to create a flour imprint on linen, heating the imprinted linen instead of the metal, then an agent was needed to help the flour adhere to the metal. That’s when oil put in its first appearance here, and has since been routinely used with an increasing number of template materials – terra cotta, plastics and now human skin -hands initially.   (The oil only became necessary when the switch was made from imprinting with  (a) wet flour slurry onto dry linen,  to imprinting with  (b) dry flour onto wet linen – that being a late stage of method development designed to achieve a fuzzier more TS-like image). But vegetable oil, even as virgin olive oil, is not the most user-friendly of substances to have to smear on one’s face, eyelids especially, as has currently needed to be done. Or does it? An agent introduced initially for use with metal is not necessarily needed for skin (while noting that oil was found to speed image development in the oven).

So a quickie comparison has been done of three pretreatments of skin (my fingers) before coating with dry flour and imprinting onto wet linen:

1. None (flour dusted onto skin directly with no binding agent)
2. Smeared with oil, then dusted with dry flour.
3. Smeared with a thin slurry of white flour in water, then dusted with dry flour.

Here’s a gallery of pix showing appearance at different stages. The captions describe the facts. Discussion of results and final choice of imprinting medium is in the Comments attached to this post.

3 (Left): precoating hands with flour paste then dry flour. 2 (Centre): precoating hands with olive oil then dry flour  1. (Right): dry flour only. (The numbering is in reverse, having been used for the reverse side of the linen, left to right, before imprinting) Top row: before imprinting onto wet linen Bottom row: depleted coatings after imprinting onto wet linen.

Top row: appearance of imprints immediately after removal from the oven, same numbering system as above. Bottom row: the same, showing final more TS-like attenuated images after thorough washing/grinding action with soap and water. Part of a bleached linen shirt was used in this experiment.

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Extract of comment, received yesterday  (29 Jan) from Thibault Heimburger:

Looking again and again at the TS image of the face (positive and negative), the mystery remains. How is it possible for a medieval forger to produce BY CHANCE an imprint that after tone reversal gives a perfect (absolutely perfect) human face ?
It is NOT a question of aesthetic.
It is a question of subtlety of the imprint.

See my reply beneath it, to which I would add this image,  one that needs no further comment or explanation:

“Perfect” face? Perfect by what criteria? Scientific or non-scientific?

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Update: 31st Jan 2016. 

Here’s a screen grab from two of yesterday’s comments. the first my own, and the holding answer from Thibault Heimburger:

Comments, this site, 30 Jan 2016

I greatly look forward to hearing what Thibault Heimburger has to say regarding the density gradients in the TS image. It’s a topic that I explored a while ago, using the Thermal LUT mode of ImageJ to perform ‘easy’ visual analysis of  TS facial density gradients, avoiding a welter of numbers:

Grayscale density gradient (left) versus the same graphic’s response to Thermal LUT 3D mode in ImageJ (right)

 

Shroud Scope, nose, “moustache” cheeks etc analysed in Thermal LUT mode in ImageJ (part of the 3D -rendering menu, but note there was no raising of the z-scale above the default(0.1) setting. What one sees here is the basal “needle forest” of the digitized image with minimal 3D and zero smoothing.

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Update: Monday 1st Feb 2016: Am still fining-tuning the procedure for taking a minimally-distorted imprint off a REAL human face.

TS face (Enrie negative) versus R&D to find the optimal technique for modelling via facial imprinting. The creases (left) need no longer be a mystery (or ignored altogether by most pro-authenticity advocates).

Simple experiments with a hood have confirmed the importance of pulling the linen taut UNDER the chin, so as to stretch it over the nose and lips, together with a little diagonal tugging down over both cheeks so as to prevent creasing. But the technique does not prevent creasing altogether. Does that matter where matching the TS image is concerned? I’ve chosen the Enrie negative to remind folk of the two prominent creases at TOP and BOTTOM of the head. Why is there so little discussion as to where they came from???  My model provides a simple answer.

Reminder: flour imprinting allows one to decide in advance which parts of the face will be in the final image, and which excluded, notably a preference for frontal over lateral planes so as to avoid image distortion. The underside of the chin can also be wiped, allowing one to pull the linen taut as described above without imprinting that area. In other words, the ‘mask’ like look of the TS, with those severe lateral cut-offs, are easily accounted for in the flour-imprinting model. Note too the sides of the nose have been wiped.  But as I had to remind a commentator here, models are for using, not believing. Much still remains to be done to get something that matches the subtlety of the TS image (while recognizing that some of that may be due to centuries of ageing).

2nd update: Feb 1

Have just received this comment from Thibault Heimburger regarding the use of ImageJ’s Thermal LUT mode to visualize image density gradients.

 

Since this posting is already becoming too long, I’ll simply insert a graphic and caption here that responds to the first point raised (the use of the Min.% control bottom right). Further discussion can be found under Comments.

The top row shows the lower face of the Ts at 3 different levels of contrast/brightness/midtone value. One cannot expect of all them to respond equally well to the Thermal LUT mode of ImageJ, displayed above with the circle and the colour-coded cone. The first picture, lower row left, is what one sees with the Min.% set to zero. It works well on the high intensity image, showing a range of elevations, less well with the lower intensity levels (smaller range of colours). One can improve the response of the latter by increasing the Min.% level (shown at 33%) but that setting is too high for the dense image, giving excessive elevation and lopping off of the tops of cones. The Min.% control is a trial-and-error scaling device that one sets to get the maximum numberof colours in the Thermal LUT mode from blue through white and yellow to red. It expands the scale between a fixed maximum (100%) and a variable minimum value.

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New update: Tue 2nd Feb 2016

Re the second part of Thibault Heimburger’s question, I think I’m now in a position to explain the subtlety of the TS image (which I’ve always acknowledged) if as I now believe it is reasonably well modelled as a flour imprint – even if that is not the precise technology that was employed. The model merely serves as an example of how a seemingly mundane way of producing a contact imprint can give rise to “subtlety” which mirrors that of the TS image. But first it’s necessary to address the specifics, namely the intermediate levels of image density that are present in the TS image. In fact, one can see those in the standard images of the TS, viewed with the naked eye, whether as positive or negative images, whether as Enrie or Durante images. But the focus right now is on the tool offered by ImageJ to view image density mapped as colour coded artificial relief, as shown above with the simple example of a circle with increasing image density towards the centre being converted to a colourful conein the Thermal LUT mode (LUT= Look Up Table).

Yes, the same Thermal mode shows the expected gradation of image density in the TS, or as Thibault correctly observes, the highest relief (shown as red) having beneath it an intermediate relief colour (yellow). What was he expecting? The lowest relief immediately (blue) with no gradation? Why? Had that been the case the TS image would have looked like a rubber stamp imprint, a crude all-or-nothing imprint, showing a total absence of “subtlety”, read crudeness. But even my flour imprints (and before it the Mark 1 direct scorch imprints off a heated template) pass that test of “subtlety” in ImageJ’s Thermal LUT mode, as shall now be shown.

First, here are flour imprints off my own fingers shown earlier in this posting that will be used as indisputably an entirely man-made image:

See original caption above. Basically, images straight from oven in top row, the same after washing in bottom row.

 

Min. % = 13 (scale lower right)

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Min. % raised to 27.

Note then that the intermediate yellow zone beneath the red is NOT exclusive to the TS image. Put another way, if that yellow zone is a marker for “subtlety” then the flour-imprinting model could be said to pass the subtlety test with, er, flying colours (well, partially elevated ones anyway, if not totally airborne).

I shall shortly be adding two images that I hope will demonstrate the manner in which  two entirely independent mechanisms of 3D image capture, mutually reinforcing, synergistic one might say, come into play that result in the semi-photographic like character of the final imprint. Time to get my camera out, and a bag of flour, and a sheet of linen…

If one set out to find a contact imprinting method that was most likely to capture 3D-ness, computer software-aided that is, it’s hard to imagine one that is better than the flour-onto-wet-linen  method.

3D–ness is captured in the very first stage of sprinkling flour from above the recumbent subject, since the flour settles under gravity  (read orthogonally in those radiation models) mainly but not exclusively on the flattest relief.

Left: flour sprinkled onto hand from above; Centre: excess shaken off; Right: flour attaches mainly but not exclusively to the flat relief, which tends to be the highest relief.

 In a recumbent human subject (e.g. the Man on the TS)  the flattest relief IS the highest relief!

Then there’s the moulding of wet linen to the body relief.

Wet linen pressed down onto hand. Note (left) the closer adhesion (additional transparency) to parts with hard underlying bone – about which more later. Note too (right) the somewhat bony skeletal look when fingers are held together such that the linen forms short bridges over the crevices between fingers, creating the impression of gaps in the final imprint that are not there, viz, the allegedly “X-ray” fingers of the Man on the TS in those radiation models (supposedly internal source of X-rays!).

Again, it’s the highest flattest relief that gets the most contact, the linen tending to make bridges  between one prominence and another where there are intervening crevices and hollows. So one has a second entirely independent mechanism that favours the highest relief over the lower relief, such that a 2D imprint will have gradations of light and dark that give visual clues to the 3D relief of the parent template.

That’s the imprinting in general terms. One also has detailed aspects to consider where particular features of anatomy are concerned, like the nose, mouth, chin, the crossed hands, the feet. Let’s postpone further discussion on those for a day or two. Suffice it to say that flour imprinting can and does deliver the goods!

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 Two more images, by request from Thibault Heimburger (see Comments, this posting, 4th Feb, re his need for highest definition pictures).

 

Flour imprint of fingers, before washing, 164KB, 72dpi

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After washing, 168KB, 72dpi

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Afterthought, added Friday 5th Feb

Have just remembered that one can use one’s printer scanner to obtain higher resolution pictures if desired (in this case it is Thibault Heimburger who has made the request which I’m only too happy to oblige). Fortunately I had not thrown away the linen with those flour imprints from my fingers. Here’s some images from the first scan, with the resolution set at its maximum (300dpi), approx 4 times greater than those above from the camera (and without camera shake!).

Approx 1MB file size, 300dpi. Oil-assisted imprinting on left, control (flour-only) on right. Both after vigorous washing in soap and water to dislodge encrusted material.

 

 

Slight enlargement then cropping of previous picture. Note that the weave is clearly visible in the scanned image, with no obvious pixellation, unlike standard photographs from the digital camera. These are ‘as is’ images: no adjustments have been made to contrast, brightness etc or other photoediting.

 

Final update: Thursday 11th Feb, 2016

OK, that’s it folks. I’ve now said all I want to say on the Turin Shroud. Have added this as my final comment.

Colin Berry says:

February 11, 2016 at 7:01 pm (Edit)

This blogging investigator has been reporting his findings online for 4 years. Having chosen to use the internet as his medium of communication, he has quietly been monitoring the manner in which the major search engines allow his research to reach his target audience, namely those who input either “shroud of turin ” or “turin shroud”.

Google has largely delivered the expected performance, based on visits to my sites, links on other sites, whilst noting that is Google.uk.

Google.com (which US-based searchers will access) demotes my postings relative to Google.uk. That is tolerable, while hardly conducive to the sharing of international research and scholarship, But as soon as one looks at the alternatives to Google, naming no names. one disappears almost completely off the listings, at least the first 10 or 20 pages of returns.

What is the point of carefully composing my flagged-up Manifesto, work in progress, if the Internet and its search engines are likely to disregard it completely?

After much deliberation I have decided to keep thoughts and suspicions to myself as to why my postings fail to appear on`those (it has to be said) mainly US-based search engines, while those on other “Shroudie”, mainly pro-authenticity sites do. Nuff said.

OK. maybe I’m boring or too sciency. But how do the search engines and their algorithms know that? Or is there human intervention that we’re not told about, or commercial influences via advertising, feeding through to what appears on search returns?

 

Just some of the buildings comprising Google’s Mountain View HQ in California. How many employees? See next image.

 

Yes, Google employs well in excess of 50,000 full time employees. How likely is it that the search engine rankings are entirely algorithm -driven courtesy of electronic robots when one has this number of employees?

 

As indicated earlier. Google is not the worst offender where returns for (shroud of turin) are concerned. Indeed, it might be said to be the best offender. But try casting your eye, dear reader, down that list of returns, page by page. Notice anything? Notice that homogenized quality, indicative of selection/rejection- or at any rate promotion/demotion? Yes. those homogenized returns put this investigator in mind of those squat little jars of food he used to spoon-feed to his sons and daughter at weaning stage – smooth, bland, pureed – totally TOTALLY  homogeneous and surprise free, and thus the total antithesis of the spirit of genuine scientific enquiry – always unsettling, always springing surprises.

Shame on you Stateside search engines for your PC, your control freakery, your attempts to stifle the agenda. You claim to be the guardians of a free society.  Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha…..

My Manifesto now goes on the back burner indefinitely. It will not appear unless or until I detect some signs of objectivity and neutrality in the listings of the major internet search engines. That might take months, It might take years, But until it does, this hitherto internet-based research project is at an end.

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Personal emails still welcome to sciencebod01 (at) aol.com, replace (at) with@,  but this site is now closed. Thank you for your interest and contributions.

Note added May 24 2016

There are many more enigmas in this old world of ours than that scarcely visible image on a piece of linen, carbon dated to the 14th century. To quote just one example, there are those mysterious Neolithic and Bronze Age circles of standing stones, of which Stonehenge is probably the best known.

Care to see a view on those megaliths that you’ve maybe never encountered before (maybe because there are too many vested interests who don’t wish you to know something that  – I have to say in all honesty – struck this blogger as immediately obvious, way back in 1998 when the 4000 year old “Seahenge”  a rough-and-ready downmarket version of Stonehenge – was uncovered by storms on the East Anglia coast)?

Here’s a screenshot of my posting yesterday to ‘the other site’, namely science buzz.

 

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