(no subject)

[theweaselking]

This photograph was taken in *1911*.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii recorded *three* monochromatic images on glass plates. These are black and white pictures, taken through filters - one red, one blue, one green - then used with a projector system to overlap them and produce colour photographs long before the invention of colour film.

His system was never this good - the American library of congress has been using computers to digitally overlay the plates in ways that Prokudin-Gorskii never could. Still, this is a photographic record of the Russian Empire, before the Revolution.

Comments

[torrain.livejournal.com]

That's really neat. Will have to follow up and see if he came up with the idea on his own, who else was doing it...

[corruptedjasper.livejournal.com]

Back when, I downloaded several of those triple-mono scans, separated them into three, and dumped them into the R, G, and B channels in Gimp. Worked really well, even for the photos that hadn't been officially done by the LoC yet. The three channels were scaled right to a pixel on a 2000 pixel square scan, they just needed some positional adjustment. Which is just awesome, when you think about it -- all three lenses were very close to being exactly the same. Of course, by 1911, that might not have been such a huge feat anymore, after all, Kodak had been selling $1 cameras by then for 11 years, so clearly lens mass production was happening.

Anyway, I don't think the system was much less good than what you see here. Positional adjustment of the channels during projection would be relatively trivial by simply moving two of the three lenses around a bit.

[desdenova.livejournal.com]

I actually know somebody who worked on this project!

[dscotton.livejournal.com]

Those pictures are super cool.