Color Photography with B&W Film

DrPsycho writes: "Saw this linked on memepool and it just blew me away. The Library of Congress website has an exhibition section which features the works of Russian photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944). Yeah yeah. Big deal, you say... until you realize his original B&W glass-plate negatives were created using a clever RGB filter system which he used almost 100 years ago. A little modern "digichromatography" ... reapplication of the filtered colours and combining them into a composite colour image... allows for stunning full colour reproductions! Not bad, considering by how long it predates the release of Kodachrome colour slide film."

Re:Haven't you ever seen a painting?

A painting really only portrays the artist's stylized view of the world- and with a limited palette. This [loc.gov] could have certainly been a painting- but a photograph gives such striking detail of EXACTLY how the scene was at that exact moment. An artist can only hope to capture every possible nuance- the expression on his face, every intricate detail of his coat. Besides- even if it was a very good painting- it's still not the same. It goes from "a pretty good idea" to an EXACT representation of what was there.

I would like to see a painting of this [loc.gov] that could capture all the details there. It's just not possible to freeze an instant in time like this- where the lighting is JUST perfect, and the reflection is just right. It would take an artist days or weeks to reproduce that- and days or weeks is NOT freezing an instant in time.

The realism of all these photos is what is so amazing. Black and white photographs and paintings give you a somewhat removed idea of what was actually happening. Looking at a picture like this [loc.gov] you can actually envision the scene there as though it was yesterday- but it wasn't yesterday, it was 100 years ago.

Computers have gone a long way towards being able to create realistic scenes- but even the untrained eye can pick out sophisticated computer generated imagery. It doesn't take a fraction of a second for your brain to go "that's fake." The same can be said for just about every painting I've seen- and I've seen a lot of paintings. There's something that can't be synthezised by human hand or computer that a photograph can capture. I for one completely understand what the original poster meant. It truly is a shift in the way that I see the world "before color".

Paintings and other art forms have their place. Whoever it was that said "a picture is worth a thousand words" is right- both in the sense of a photograph and a painting. They just say different things. A photograph can be the most unbiased eye, and a painting could never hope to be this way.

Re:Interesting artifacts

In contrast to what you are saying, this is from three different exposures (probably in addition to any slight angle differences as well).

From the site:

"A single, narrow glass plate about 3 inches wide by 9 inches long was placed vertically into the camera by Prokudin-Gorskii . He then photographed the same scene three times in a fairly rapid sequence using a red filter, a green filter and a blue filter."

Before saying other people are wrong, try reading the site.

Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)

Re:Amazing quality.

One of the main reasons why these photos are of such high quality is simply the size of the exposed film. The photographer was using a 3"x3" sheet of film (glass actually) for each color. Compare with a modern color camera using 35mm, or the even smaller APS format film. Large format cameras have a huge quality advantage over 35mm cameras. You wouldn't want to use one for shooting an ice hockey game, but for lanscapes, portraits, surveys, and the like they are wonderful.

Re:Color projector, not slides, negatives, or prin

He had a single lense camera and a triple lense projector. I've double-checked: what everyone is thinking was a camera is, in fact, the projector.

This is one of the major problems with the Internet: it's a "skim" media -- the visual analogue of the soundbite -- and it's so very easy to end up misinformed because one didn't actually pay close attention.

The article re: how the fellow did his work *clearly* tells us that he used a standard-issue camera, taking three pictures in succession. The *one* image of a three-lensed machine is, if one actually reads the text, the projector that he used to combine the three images.

So, no, the colour fringing isn't parallax, perspective or any other such thing: it's caused by movement, because there was a time interval between each shot.

What leaves me remaining curious, is whether the colours are true to life, or have been exagerated. I simply don't expect turn-of-the-century fabrics to be so boldly and richly coloured! They look fake to me... but there's every chance that they really were those colours. True dyes on natural fiber must look more colourful than printed dyes on synthetics...

--

Intended for three-gun color projection

Read the background materials. It's worth noting that the images weren't made into prints in those days. Rather, they were shown with a special projector with separate red, green and blue beams aimed at the same spot, just like all pre-LCD projection televisions and video projectors. Very clever.

Re:Haven't you ever seen a painting?

Everything was black and white back then. Its just that everything turned to color in the early 20th century. The color paintings you see? Well, a lot of great artists were insane, so were painting in color way back when.

It would appear that this guy's camera was quite insane as well.

(With all apologies to Calvin's dad)

Amazing quality.

I'm not sue whether or not its the process that was used to take them or the way that they were scanned, but I can't help but marvel at the clarity and quality of these images.

Black & White film has always been shown to be able to produce higher contrast and sharpness than color images, and I can't help but wonder if using this kind of process isn't a better method of producing color photographs than what we traditionally use. But these images are just so clear and so lifelike that I can't help but wonder. (and if this process was used today, we could most likely eliminate the "artifacts" in color-shifting that others have noted by making the simultanous lenses much closer together)

But even if it was just the scanning process, I have to say these images are still incredible..just to be able to see this time in history in such vibrant realism, is incredible.

-Julius X

Re:Interesting artifacts

I was noticing that too. I suspect most of it is due to the fact that the three lenses are in different places in space. Anything with a specular reflection like water should show this effect because the glare on something appears to be in a different place depending on viewing angle.

There are a few other things that make these pictues look unusual. One is that many of them have a very high depth of field. The other is that they are high resolution with few dust-marks. I suspect that is partially due to the fact that there are three films and thus three times the resolution in some sense. Also, any marks in one plate could probably be repaired using information from the other two.

--Ben

Re:This technique was used on DigiView for the Ami

Of course your subject had to be still for the entire grabbing process (and this was sloooooow) which limited it's usefulness.

Some friends and I spent several hours in a basement once, as one of us desperately tried to sit still long enough for the camera to grab our portraits, while the others tried just as desperately to make him laugh.

In all of the pictures that we eventually captured, we're all sitting there with exaggerated frowns because we were trying so hard not to lose it. We look like a bunch of hoods

Good times.

-schussat

Ditto digital video

Actually many (most?) digital video cameras from prosumer on up use filters to seperate out RGB elements and direct them to different CCDs. This allows the full bandwidth of the CCD to be applied to one spectrum, effectively increasing the number of significant bits that are captured.

B&W into colour...

Big deal, you say... until you realize his original B&W glass-plate negatives were created using a clever RGB filter system which he used almost 100 years ago. A little modern "digichromatography" ... reapplication of the filtered colours and combining them into a composite colour image... allows for stunning full colour reproductions!

From a technical standpoint, colour separations were probably a lot more likely at that time than anything like Kodachrome. (Actually, RGB is the basis for many modern colour systems as well.)

What I find astounding is that people actually figured out that a separation could produce full-colour images at a time when there were no real scientific antecedents. That takes real imagination!

There's something quite eerie about these photographs. It's as though in our mind's eye we really think that the world in the Victorian era was sepia-toned and monochrome. It's a shock to think that in fact, in terms of natural subjects, it looked much like it does today.

If you find this kind of time travel interesting, you should investigate the various "rephotographic" projects in which the sites of well-known historical photographs are identified, tracked down, and photographed again from a viewpoint and under lighting conditions as close as possible to the original. When you see this stuff, you start looking for the things that have changed. Again, it's a shock to see how little a hundred and fifty years adds to many subjects.

Re:No pollution on the buildings!

There's no pollution on the buildings because the photographer chose to photograph nice areas. In the industrial areas of this time (and since the beginnings of the industrial era), soot and other easily detectable pollutants were horrible, far worse than anything you'd find in the U.S. today.

Same concept as in astrophotography.

I don't know if this was done a hundred years ago, but I know that in astrophotography, this method is very common. While this is probably done with B&W film, CCD camera pictures are taken this way. (Hey, it's the 00's man.) A notable example is the HST. A plethora of you probably know this, but I felt like reminding you. BTW, I can't imagine the fore-mentioned method being much more difficult than standard B&W photography was a hundred years ago.

Re:Interesing side effects

The interesting one is the guy to the right. In the red channel the guy is scratching his face; in the other two his arms are down. Very apparent what's going on.

Dlugar

Re:No pollution on the buildings!

A church that's 800 years old looks like the day it was built to my eyes, and that most of the wear and tear that I'm used to has occurred just within the past century.

No kidding! Just look at this picture [loc.gov] of the Church of St. Dmitrii from the exhibit, and compare it to this one [uky.edu], taken in the early 1990s. The recent one is filthy.

That the deterioration to these buildings occurred largely in the last century is correct, but do not place the blame solely on the industrialization. The Soviet state had a much greater effect on the current poor condition of Russian Orthodox churches.

During the rule of Lenin and Stalin, thousands of churches were completely destroyed, most famously, The Church of Christ the Saviour [ticketsofrussia.ru], in Moscow. Many more were damaged and looted, others were used as clubs or wharehouses, like the magnificent Church of the Savior on the Blood [cityvision2000.com] in St. Petersburg [www.spb.ru] (picture here [washington.edu]). It has only been relatively recently that major restorations have been undertaken to return some of these architectural landmarks to their former glory. Furthermore, a state obsessed with military parity with the West had few resources left to perform even simple maintenance to clean the facades of many buildings.

Something else that is interesting is how, in some respects, so little has changed from the time these pictures were taken. Aside from the clothing, this picture [loc.gov] could have been taken in any Russian town this very day. And a train ride through the Russian countryside reveals many villages that look similar to this [loc.gov] even today.

Prokudin-Gorskii's photographs are simply amazing, though, a real treasure. I agree with many of the other posters who said that these pictures place one's black and white mental image of the past in a whole new light. Kudos to the Library of Congress for this exhibit. I am sure it will be of immense value to scholars and students world wide.

Interesting artifacts

There are some interesting artifacts of the process. Look at the water in the second photo set [loc.gov]. Or the top half of the pole.

Was There Stereophonic Sound Then, Too?

When I was a kid, the whole world was colour but monaural. Then, when I was about 12, I started fooling around with my parents' audio equipment. From then on, I could hear my whole world in glorious stereophonic sound! Man, those mono years sucked by comparison. I took piano lessons when I was a kid. I wonder what they would have sounded like in stereo?

Anyway, I took a class on photography in high school and did a presentation on colour photo printing. During my research, I saw a lot of early attempts at colour photography using black-and-white film. None were as clear as the pictures on that site, tho. Most didn't have the red, green, and blue colour plates quite lined up correctly causing red, green, and blue flaring at the edges of objects.

In fact, on closer inspection, some of Prokudin-Gorskii's pictures look like they were done by snapping three pictures in quick succession with the different filters. Take a look at the water in this one [loc.gov], which was probably not calm at the time. Also, look at the little guy on the far left in this picture [loc.gov]. I guess he couldn't sit still!

Still, this photographer was really clever! Now if I can just figure out how to record stereophonic sound on a monaural tape recorder...

Re:You mean there was color back then?

I thought the whole world was black and white in the past!

You didn't read the article!

A little modern "digichromatography" ... reapplication of the filtered colours and combining them into a composite colour image... allows for stunning full colour reproductions!

Just like the Calvin & Hobbes comic, these images became color way after the entire world did sometime in the 1950s.

Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate

Interesing side effects

Some of these images contain elements that moved through the picture between different shots being taken with different filters. You can see this clearly in photoshop. For example, in this [loc.gov] image, if you turn OFF different combinations of R,G and B channels in photoshop (and probably GIMP too), you can see a man in the background appear and disappear. In the composite photo, he appears to be glowing with red and blue halos. In the individual channels, sometimes he is there, and sometimes he is not!

This has been around since day one of Photography

Shortly after developing transparent-layered photography (positive-negative on translucent/transparent bases) William Henry Fox Talbot made pictures like this and displayed them to the Royal Society. The RGB combination worked, but only by accident, as the current light-sensitive emulsions were not sensitive to blue. Turned out one of the blue models used reflected heavily in the UV, which was recorded. All of this around 1845.

Single plate color didn't show up until 1905 or so. See Autochrome. Also, Technicolor movie film operated this way, as did dye-transfer prints (still the best color print process, IF you can find someone to make them...)

What is really interesting though is that these negatives lack the standard registration marking of most such processes. Without these markings, it is very difficult to produce a reasonable image. Also, emulsion creep makes recovery from older images even more difficult. Using the computer to key off of the image points themselves rather than a series of markings on the substrate allows such old images to be restored with reasonable accuracy. And I bet it beats playing with registration pins and a squegee any old day.

Re:Interesing side effects

I don't think the man actually moved between shots. The shots were not taken so far apart that the man could move and then come back again. Besides, if the shots were taken that far apart, the other people in the photos would not appear so clearly, since they would also have moved slightly.

In this particular case, I think the man in red and blue was wearing colours that didn't show up clearly under a particular filter. The man is there, he is just very very dim.

There are shots were the was definite movement between shots. This one [loc.gov] for example. The colourful shimmer on the water is probably caused by the fact that the water moved slightly between shots.

Most cool, I think.

Wow

I find this most fascinating from a psychological standpoint. As I look at these pictures and consider their age, I am unable to conceive of the concept of looking on a scene from this time period in full colour. All my life, I've seen the world of these years in black and white. To see them in colour is to deconstruct a piece of the allure that surrounds them. As Marshall Mcluhan would argue, the medium here, is, indeed, the message [marshallmcluhan.org]. To change the medium is to completely change the way I have been taught to view the period. The black and white medium alienates me from the people the past, providing me, through its imperfection, a way to differentiate present reality from past reality. By removing this alienating force, I find myself able to identify with the time in which these photos were taken in a way that is so new and different that I find it disturbing. The power of images in creating a "global village" is something that Mcluhan talked about at length. Perhaps these images of the past help bridge differences between past and present in the same way that TV images help bridge differences between western and eastern hemisphere.

This technique was used on DigiView for the Amiga

Some people might find it interesting that in the early days of computer imaging, Newtek [newtek.com] actually developed a product called DigiView [amiga-hardware.com] to be used on Commodore Amiga computers which used a standard black and white camera to produce full-color images. They used the same trick as here: 3 color filters (red, gree, blue) which the digitizing program direct you to place in front of the camera, was used to digitize the image 3 times, and then combined to form the full-color image.

Nice hack which thanks to this post I found out has a 100-year history!!! :-)