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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Image Processing Techniques _ 100 year old color photographs

Posted by: ElkGroveDan Aug 23 2010, 05:32 AM

I thought this story was fascinating and because it deals with a topic most of us are interested in I thought I'd post it here in the hopes someone knows more about the device and the history of this ancient RGB process.

Russia in color, a century ago
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html

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.

Posted by: nprev Aug 23 2010, 05:44 AM

OT (I guess), but these are really remarkable images. I don't think I've ever seen a color photo of anything this old before.

Posted by: ugordan Aug 23 2010, 07:46 AM

Saw these images a couple of days ago and still can't wrap my head around the crispness and quality of the color. Absolutely stunning, some of them are better than the early digital cameras and in fact look like they were taken yesterday.

Much as I don't like temporally displaced filter exposures due to artifacts they introduce, I guess this illustrates the superiority of the approach.

Posted by: MahFL Aug 23 2010, 01:24 PM

Truely amazing.

Posted by: NickF Aug 24 2010, 07:49 PM

Very evocative images, agreed.

I refer interested UMSFers to Frank Hurley's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paget_process colour plates taken during http://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofnsw/sets/72157618020442474/with/3523887173/, as the R/G/B filter process is similar to that used by Prokudin-Gorskii .

Amazing to be able to look back in time in this way.

Posted by: djellison Aug 24 2010, 08:32 PM

I have a book of Hurley's Antarctic images, and found a copy to give to JB a couple of years ago.