Century old color photos using monochrome film

[echnaton]

I saw a story this morning that made me think of the Apollo TV camera. Be aware that it is one page full of big images.

Russia in color, a century ago

With images from southern and central Russia in the news lately due to extensive wildfires, I thought it would be interesting to look back in time with this extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time - when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun. Collected here are a few of the hundreds of color images made available by the Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in 1948.

[raven]

I know, isn't it glorious? It's like looking at a time travellers photographs they are so vivid.
I find it almost spooky. It's so easy to think of history as, well history, but this brings it into life.

[echnaton]

The resolution on those old big glass plate photos can be amazing.

[gtvc]

time travelers!!! ;D

Cool pictures!!! ;D

Can you use digital techniques to convert old black and white pictures to this? we have computers today, some old black and white movies have color now.

[randombloke]

Dec 2, 2011 9:40:54 GMT -4 gtvc said:

time travelers!!! ;D

Cool pictures!!! ;D

Can you use digital techniques to convert old black and white pictures to this? we have computers today, some old black and white movies have color now.

You can make guesses, even pretty good guesses if you have an accurate sample of the original colours, but they are never going to be as good as these.

I do like that you can see the fundamental issue with this technique even in these posed shots; look at the water and some of the children in the later pictures.

[Apollo Gnomon]

Awesome pictures, thanks!

I even like the errors, like the water, the edge distortion in #33 and the misalignment on the kid -- it reveals the technique. The landscapes are nice, but I really like the portraits. Those are marvelous!

[gtvc]

Yes the pictures are incredible .

[raven]

Here is another site on the collection and an explanation of how they recovered them and a link to the entire collection.
As others have mentioned the colour process had limitations, but it is still stunning.

[Data Cable]

Dec 2, 2011 9:40:54 GMT -4 gtvc said:

Can you use digital techniques to convert old black and white pictures to this?

I suggest you direct such inquiries to Ted Turner.

Dec 2, 2011 10:29:54 GMT -4 randombloke said:

I do like that you can see the fundamental issue with this technique even in these posed shots; look at the water and some of the children in the later pictures.

Right, as with Apollo color TV, anything which moves in the scene screws up the color registration.

Shot #33 is interesting, though. It seems perfectly registered in the middle, but not so at the edges. I had initially thought this might be genuine chromatic aberration rearing its ugly, multi-colored head, even through multiple filtered exposures. But, after splitting the channels and comparing them individually, it appears that the red filter somehow introduced some pincushion distortion to that particular exposure, as the green and blue appear perfectly registered throughout the frame.

And while some of the children in shot #27 clearly weren't holding still (especially that toddler on the left), much of the color error, particularly the ridgeline and background buildings, appears to be the fault of a badly mutilated blue exposure.

[gillianren]

Dec 2, 2011 9:40:54 GMT -4 gtvc said:

Can you use digital techniques to convert old black and white pictures to this? we have computers today, some old black and white movies have color now.

Yes, and it's blasphemy and a destruction, in many cases, of someone's artistic vision. A well-shot B&W movie is far more artistically satisfying than a badly colorized one--and there's no other kind. It might also interest you to know that many old B&W movies weren't; they were hand-tinted a frame at a time to create impact. If you want to colorize film, you don't need a computer to do it.

[randombloke]

Wait, who colourises old B&W cinema reels?
Documentary film of, say, the D-day landings is a good candidate, I think, but old silent movies and such? Forget it.

[raven]

You can extrapolate, but the information is gone, kaput. One might as well ask for a CSI style enhancement of a single frame.

[gillianren]

Dec 2, 2011 15:26:58 GMT -4 randombloke said:

Wait, who colourises old B&W cinema reels?
Documentary film of, say, the D-day landings is a good candidate, I think, but old silent movies and such? Forget it.

My copy of Miracle on 34th Street offers the original B&W as a "special feature."

[twik]

I don't think you could colorize movies "in this way". These photos were done with an entirely different technology from the computerized colorization of movies that Ted Turner thought was a good idea, may the fleas of a thousand camels chase him down in Atlanta.

The funny thing is how (as a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon suggested) we tend to think of the days before colour photography was prevalent as being, mentally, a black and white world. Colour film of WWII scenes always comes as a shock to me, as if those days should have been experienced at the time as b/w and grainy.

[BertL]

When I was younger, I used to wonder why old paintings were in colour. Clearly they shouldn't have been, I mean have you seen how the world looked like before colour photography?!