Some thoughts on art and A.I.
About four years ago I started a presentation project that I titled “Seeing Like An Artist”. It was meant to help photographers to expand their vision and skills. The presentation never saw the light of day. I had downloaded a large group of images from my favorite source for free and unrestricted art, the Cleveland Museum of Art. Those images are still on my computer.
Recently I decided that maybe a number of small articles on that topic might be fun to do. As I organized the images into sub-topics I came to “Rembrandt lighting”.
Rembrandt lighting is a portrait lighting technique that uses soft, diffuse side illumination that creates a triangular patch of light under the subject’s eye on the side of the face that’s less illuminated.
There were several Rembrandt paintings in this collection, just one matched the modern definition of Rembrandt lighting. My online search did not find any others that came closer. Rembrandt did favor soft side light. Here are examples. These are cropped portions of some of his art or at least paintings that came from his studio.
In “Portrait of a Woman” the lighting is quite frontal. Look at the shadow of her chin.
In “A Bearded Man Wearing a Hat” the light is way too far to the side to be called Rembrandt lighting.
“A Young Man with a Chain” shows Rembrandt lighting.
Here is a small self-portrait engraving. It also shows such lighting or comes close to it.
So, yes, such lighting was his style, but he certainly was not a fanatic about it.
My archive of my own photography didn’t have much either. Most of my portraiture work is candid photography and not done in a studio.
Here is one of my photos that comes close.
With A.I., artificial intelligence, frequently in the news these days, I decided to go to my favorite sites for some generated art. The sites were Deep Dream, Art Breeder, and OpenAI DALL-E.
Here is what I asked for:
“A portrait of a young lady, maybe a college student. She has a faint smile on her friendly face. There is strong “Rembrandt lighting”. The background is dark but her face shines with beauty. She is dressed in a light contemporary manner. Her left side is turned toward the viewer. There is a triangular patch of light on her right cheek – the classical definition of Rembrandt lighting.“
Here are some of the images generated on these sites.
As you can see, the A.I. image generators were not good with Rembrandt lighting. Only the two OpenAI images can be described as showing Rembrandt lighting.
There was one sentence in my “seed” that could be easily misinterpreted. “She is dressed in a light contemporary manner.” – There is no indication of contemporary to what or who, so I can’t complain about the dress, the hats or the jewelry.
My specification was clear, “Her left side is turned toward the viewer.” Four of the six portraits do that. I specified a “triangular patch of light on her right cheek“. That should have been specific enough. One does, but the face is turned the wrong way.
Well, it seems that A.I. has little concept of left and right.
.:. © 2025 Ludwig Keck