The novelty of being able to convert areas of different shades on an image into a representation of a three dimensional landscape, with the darkest areas the highest and the lighter areas lowest, was so exciting in 1976 that all sense of scientific caution was blown to the winds, and wildly exaggerated statements of the uniqueness of the Shroud and the precision of the image were published. In 1978, Ian Wilson wrote:
On the television screen to which the image analyser was linked was the Shroud figure, seen for the first time from the side, in perfect three-dimensional relief. (Wilson, Ian, The Turin Shroud (updated), Penguin, 1979)
This was nonsense of a high order. Not only did the image analyser not view the image from the side, but if it had done, it would have looked a bit like this:
This is because the image is hidden behind ‘walls’ derived from the lines of scorch marks which , being darker than the image, appear higher in the 3D representation. From a higher angle, we can see them more easily.
The obvious next step is to remove the scorch marks as best we can.
And now see if we get “perfect three dimensional relief” from the side.
Clearly not. And yet, more than twenty years after Wilson’s book, another author could write:
The image on the shroud […] is a perfect contour map of the body of the man in the shroud. (Antonacci, Mark, The Resurrection of the Shroud, M. Evans & Co., New York, 2000)
Undeterred by the absurdity of the claim, author after author goes on to announce that:
An ordinary photograph, being two dimensional, simply does not contain sufficient information relating to distance and proportions to be immediately translatable into a meaningful three-dimensional image. (Wilson, op. cit.)
This doesn’t mean much. All photographs are two dimensional, and the problem is that they usually contain rather more information regarding the position of the subject in relation to the camera, not less. In order to demonstrate the unsuitability of a ‘normal photograph’, John Jackson and Eric Jumper chose a photo of the pope of the time, Pius XI. The face is in three-quarter profile and brightly lit from the right.
Given the starkness of the light and the unequal shadows, it is hardly surprising that a 3D interpretation leave something to be desired!
Other investigators have used even less suitable photos as straw horses in an attempt to justify the claim of ‘uniqueness’ for the Shroud image. If they had made any effort to find an image equally devoid of shadows, or at least as best as they could find, they would have realised that the phenomenon of the Shroud is commonplace. Here is the best picture I could find of the pope with the minimum of shadow, and the 3D interpretation.
There is still a severe distortion below the nose, and the irregular colouration of the eyes is rather erratically rendered. Removing more shadow, and the distorting colour of the hair and eyes, here is a bust of the same pope.
This interpretation is a great deal better than the Shroud. Similar shadow-free, face-on portraits fare as well.
All of them, however, resemble bas reliefs a great deal better than they resemble fully three dimensional statues. This can be explored with regard to the idea that the Shroud is a ‘contour map’. It isn’t, of course, in the conventional sense, but it can easily be made to resemble one, by dividing the gradual shading of light and dark into areas of separate discrete shades, and using the edges of those areas as contour lines. Here is a comparison of the ‘contour map’ of the Shroud, with another derived from the slicing of a 3D model into layers.
It can easily be seen that to achieve any kind of realism, the shading of the nose and cheeks, in particular, must fade gradually from prominence at the tip of the nose to invisibility at the sides of the cheeks. This simply doesn’t happen with the Shroud image, even allowing for the prominence of the hair on either side of the face. After removing the hair from the Shroud image, this is what a true profile looks like, compared to the 3D model:
All the 3D imaging above has been carried out using ImageJ, a free image manipulation program anybody can download off the internet. I have coloured the images green so as to make them look more familiar to people who only know the cathode-ray-tube images of the VP-8 image analyser on which the earliest 3D representations of the Shroud were made. In 1986, such processing power was rightly considered extraordinary, but in the (then) blinding light of its capabilities, the VP-8 and its results were awarded almost supernatural status. Because John Jackson and Eric Jumper worked for NASA, it was assumed, wrongly, that the VP-8 was a NASA piece of equipment, which it wasn’t at all, and this was extrapolated to claim that it was used for producing relief simulations of the moon from photos of its surface, for which it was wholly unsuitable, as the shadows cast by the bright light of the sun make a nonsense of any attempted brightness/elevation correlation. The VP-8 was actually designed by Interpretations Systems Inc. for shadow-free image density analysis, such as to enable 3D visualisation of X-rays and ultra-sound images, for which it was perfect.
Nevertheless, the error continues to be promulgated. Mark Antonacci, in 2000, wrote the following gobbledygook:
When images of planets and moons in outer space are produced, they are not recorded with a traditional camera. The photons of light from a three-dimensional object in outer space are measured electronically, and based on the distance that each of these light impulses has travelled from the object to the space probe, a true, three-dimensional computer-generated image of the object can be interpreted and displayed. When a photograph of the man in the Shroud is put in a similar device, a miraculous three-dimensional image results. (Antonacci, Mark, The Resurrection of the Shroud, M. Evans & Co, 2000)
No, that’s not how ‘outer space’ photographs are taken, and you cannot measure how far a photon has travelled. Even Ian Wilson, normally very careful, wrote in 2010 about “a state-of-the-art piece of equipment developed for the NASA space program”. (Wilson, Ian, The Shroud, Bantam, 2011). Most recently, in October 2019, Robert Rucker mentioned the “… analysis of a photograph of the Shroud by a NASA VP-8 image analyzer …” (Rucker, Robert, The Carbon Dating Problem for the Shroud of Turin, Part 1 – Background, at shroudresearch.net, 2019)
Back in the 20th century, it was not so easy to check the ‘facts’ one read in books, and errors, intentional and unintentional, could and sometimes did spread slowly through a field of study, gaining authority and stability the more they were reperpetrated. Twenty years into the next millennium there is much less excuse, especially in an allegedly carefully researched book, paper or article.