A few months ago I was looking something up on Wikipedia and ran across a color photograph that was taken sometime in the beginning of the 20th century. I was surprised how current this picture looked and in what great shape it was, just as if it was taken perhaps 10-20 years ago. Especially compared to other back and white pre WWII pictures I had seen before. I didn’t think much more about it at that time, because I was visiting Wikipedia for a different purpose.
Prokudin-Gorskii 1906
Last week I read an article about Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii who was responsible for those remarkable color-photographs taken a hundred years ago. He was a chemist born in Russia in 1863 who studied in St. Petersburg, Berlin and Paris.
He developed a process in which three black and white pictures were taken of an object in quick succession. One picture was taken with a red-filter, one with a blue, and another with a green filter. These three black and white pictures where arranged as a glass plate negative. With a projector he could later add these three components to a full color representation. He wasn’t able to make a paper print in color at the time, but he was the first to make use of a technology that has remained pretty much unchanged, and is still used today in digital cameras which capture and store light in RGB components, or computer screens that reproduce a color image by illuminating three R, G and B components to render a color pixel with LCD cells or phosphors of a classic tube monitor. The principle really hasn’t changed in more than 100 years.
It was first discovered by physicist James Clerk Maxwell who created the first permanent color photograph in 1861.
In 1909, Prokudin-Gorskii started to document the Russian empire in color, completing his project in 1915. The pictures were intended to be used in education to inform children about the history, past, present, and future of the Russian empire. In 1948 his color photographs were purchased by the Library of Congress. His pictures are some of the most important documents about Russia before World War I, and also a significant document of technological history.
Prokudin-Gorskii 1915
Tolstoy 1908
His subjects include medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, railroad tracks, factories of the then modern Russian industry, portraits of workers, important personalities as well as people from other areas of life. The Library of Congress has made the complete collection available to the public.
Glassplate Negative
I downloaded a scan of the photograph Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii took in 1909, a century ago, of 84-year-old Pinkhus Karlinskii, the supervisor of the Chernigov floodgate, and attempted to reconstruct the color photo myself. The Library of Congress reproduction number for this picture is LC-P87-5006 and can be found in the online catalog. The glass negative is available in three file versions: higher resolution JPEG version (78 KB), uncompressed archival TIFF version (70 MB) and the highest resolution TIFF version (70 MB).
The process is actually very simple. First, the three black and white frames of the glass negative need to be separated and aligned. I copied and pasted them on three layers. The first frame on top is the blue component, the middle frame is the green component, and red at the bottom. I stacked them on top of each other and aligned them with the help of the Difference layer mode.
In Photoshop it was very easy to transform the layers into red, green and blue slides that add up to a complete color picture. In Layer Style/Blending Options, section ‘Advanced Blending’ you can specify the R,G,B channels. If you don’t have these options you can also work with solid color layers and the appropriate layer modes. It’s a bit more work, but the result should be the same. I set the Blending channel to R for the red frame, G for the green, and B for the blue. Then I duplicated and flattened the image and was ready to fix some of the spots and scratches. The final result, a colored view of an era I only knew in black and white before:
RGB Components
Pinkhus Karlinskii Cropped
I still find it unbelievable that this photo is 100 years old. More amazing pictures can be found at the Library of Congress.
Very cool. The Tolstoy and color self portrait are amazing. They really look like they could have been taken today.
What a genius. Wonder how it feels to be so incredibly far ahead of your time.