A couple of days ago I stumbled across ReLight, a new (to me, it’s been out for almost a year!) program to create “relightable images,” what I usually call RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imaging) or PTM (Polynomial Texture Mapping). These are files that allow you to produce dynamic photographs for which you can control the way that the image is lit; I use it for inscriptions of the Aegean Bronze Age, mostly Linear B but also Linear A.
ReLight is an absolute game-changer of an application. Up until recently, my workflow required at least two RTI applications to produce .ptm files. First, I used RTIbuilder to make an .lp file (the file that basically tells the program how to produce a .ptm file; then I used RTIprocessor to produce the actual file. This was an extremely fussy and clunky process: it required the source images to be oriented properly, the file extensions had to be lowercase .jpg (necessitating a file name changer), the file names and folders couldn’t have spaces in them anywhere, and certain folders needed to exist with specific names or the whole thing wouldn’t work. ReLight solves all of that: it’s a single program that allows you to make all the changes you need in the program itself. It allows you to make extremely high-resolution RTI files: yesterday I made an 884 megabyte PTM file of the Pylos tablet Eq 213, and the image quality is spectacular, noticeably (if not substantially) better than what I could have done in the past (I won’t post it here because of copyright concerns; it’s something I’m hoping to resolve soon).
The main thing, though, is that ReLight just makes the whole process of making relightable images so much easier, both for people new to the technique and for people who have been doing RTI for years.
Aegean prehistory 