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What you see on the left is a heavily edited version of a black-and-white documentary negative. The shroud itself is a large woven cloth with burned sections, water spots, and the very faint "negative" image of a male body. (The forward parts of the body that touched the shroud are darker than the backward parts that didn't.)

Click here to see an original unmodified color photograph and its accompanying contrast-enhanced, black-and-white negative, from which this image was derived.

The photographic negative reverses this relationship to a positive, lifelike image. That image was then cropped to remove the distraction of the most prominant burn spots, retouched to subdue imperfections in the cloth, given greatly increased contrast to make the faint figure more visible, and colorized from pale salmon to gold.

So the visual truth of this image is as complicated as the religious truth of the shroud it depicts.

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If you want to see a high-resolution version of the unedited color photo of the shroud, click here. (Warning: it will take quite some time to load.)

If you want to find out more about the Shroud of Turin and the controversies surrounding it, click here. This will take you to a complete web site devoted to its scientific investigation -- with more photos, the scientific report, history, bibliography, and links.