Earliest color photographs

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purpleoscar

Rock n' Roll Doggie ALL ACCESS
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Autochromes by Karel Šmirous

Boy I wasn't aware that color photographs were invented so early :camera:

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TYWKIWDBI: Some of the world's first color photographs

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Top 10 Incredible Early Firsts In Photography - Listverse
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Tartan Ribbon 1861.

Princeton University Press Blog � Dawn of the Color Photograph
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France 1916

a collection of autochrome plates
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1910

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1913

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1912
 
I always find it interesting to look at old colour photographs. We're so used to seeing days gone by in black and white, that we almost forget the real world had colour then too. There was an interesting video I watched a while back on how the brain perceives black and white images as opposed to colour. I might have posted it in the other photo thread a while back, but I'll see if i can dig it up again incase anyone wants to watch. Its a powerpoint presentation, so you wont get blown away with visuals, but the information is really great

Thanks for posting this, purpleoscar
 
...Those look...insanely good.

Some of them look this good only due to modern digital restoration techniques, such as the one of Alim Khan (the overweight fellow with the turban and sword). What's important, however, is that they were photographed in colour, so the colour that you do see isn't fabricated.
 
Some of them look this good only due to modern digital restoration techniques, such as the one of Alim Khan (the overweight fellow with the turban and sword). What's important, however, is that they were photographed in colour, so the colour that you do see isn't fabricated.

I would say in the case of that photo, that the colour was fabricated to some extent. The technology to reproduce colour with that accuracy and saturation wasnt available back then. While the colours werent added in post, they were certainly enhanced and I dont think its a fair representation of what the image looked like at the time it was taken
 
Its the first video link in here:

From Mirror Neurons to the Mona Lisa | The New York Academy of Sciences

I havent watched the other videos, but they could be interesting too

Thanks! You can almost take a course. :D

There are some stereo ones as well. Though I have to shrink it down so I can cross my eyes to make it 3D. Though stereo images weren't new as there were many black and white ones.

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These would be nice wallpapers:

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This one with the skull makes me laugh:
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The long exposure times meant lots of blurring so people would have to stand still to avoid too much motion blur.
 
I would say in the case of that photo, that the colour was fabricated to some extent. The technology to reproduce colour with that accuracy and saturation wasnt available back then. While the colours werent added in post, they were certainly enhanced and I dont think its a fair representation of what the image looked like at the time it was taken

It's hard to say, mainly because these photos were taken on four separate colour plates and were never developed, precisely because the technology wasn't there to develop them.

Damn Interesting • Color Photos From the World War I Era

There was no means to develop color prints at that time, but modern technology has allowed these images to be recombined in their full original colors.
 
This is why the Russian ones look so good:

Registration Problem

The three black and white frames which comprise each negative were made using three colored light filters separated by a certain interval in time, during which the position of the negative plate changed along all three dimensions, which resulted in perspective distortions to varying degrees from one frame to the next. The simple superimposition of the three high resolution frames (typically 3700 by 3500 pixels) upon one another by matching one point results in discrepancies in other parts of the image.

This problem has been solved by developing a special software application which finds the best perspective transformation of the “blue” and “red” frames with respect to the “green” in such a way as to minimize the total matching error on the sub-pixel level.

This is how they look before they use the correction software:

Prokudin-Gorsky Color Database

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Then when corrected they are supposed to look less damaged:

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The best looking ones I can find are these ones:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Mikhailovich_Prokudin-Gorskii

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It looks like Technicolor when they fix it. The French ones still have a pointillism look. Though they both give that "transported back in time" feel.
 
So, the pictures were taken ages ago,but only recently developed?

Only recently fixed to paper. The original photographer would project the three separate images through the corresponding gel (RGB) and the colour image would be viewed on a screen
 
Only recently fixed to paper. The original photographer would project the three separate images through the corresponding gel (RGB) and the colour image would be viewed on a screen

Oh ok, thank you. I'm sure if I had clicked any of the links in this thread I could have found this out lol.
 
Oh ok, thank you. I'm sure if I had clicked any of the links in this thread I could have found this out lol.

no worries :) I'm happy purpleoscar made this a separate thread from the regular photo thread too as I'm sure it interests people beyond those who regularly check the latter
 
Exactly, I never would have seen it in the photography thread. I kind of want a copy of some of these prints.
 
Interesting history here:

File:prokudin-Gorskii-09.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

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View of the Nilova Monastery. The Monastery of St. Nil' on Stolobnyi Island in Lake Seliger in Tver' Province, northwest of Moscow, illustrates the fate of church institutions during the course of Russian history. St. Nil (d. 1554) established a small monastic settlement on the island around 1528. In the early 1600s his disciples built what was to become one of the largest, wealthiest, monasteries in the Russian Empire. The monastery was closed by the Soviet regime in 1927, and the structure was used for various secular purposes, including a concentration camp and orphanage. In 1990 the property was returned to the Russian Orthodox Church and is now a functioning monastic community once more.
 
(Jeez the kid is probably dead by now).

lol. I always thought it was just my morbid self who thought of those things when looking at old photographs. I was at a shoot in an old curling arena a few weeks back. They had pictures of all the old teams that used to curl there on the wall. I was literally looking at them and saying to a coworker "Hes dead by now...hes dead....those guys are all dead..."
 
lol. I always thought it was just my morbid self who thought of those things when looking at old photographs. I was at a shoot in an old curling arena a few weeks back. They had pictures of all the old teams that used to curl there on the wall. I was literally looking at them and saying to a coworker "Hes dead by now...hes dead....those guys are all dead..."

Oh yeah I'm the same way when I watch a silent movie especially when there's a dog or cat. "Yep that dog is LONG since been dead."
 
I'm amazed, really, at both how clean everything seemed to be a century ago, coupled with how real everything looks when in a sharp colour photo...heh.
 
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