Thought this link might be interesting for those interested in channels. The images are realy quite fantastic as is the process.

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/

This is amazing stuff. I'm ashamed I've never heard of this guy.
dc

It's incredible to get a full color view of a world that existed in only black and white photos. If you look at the process for creating the prints you see what a visionary the photographer was.

I saw that a few months ago. That was definitely a man ahead of his time. I think he was playing his iPod when he figured out how to do that. ;)

Ed

There's also a great section where they go over the process he used to create his images. I've been meaning to give it a shot. I just have to find some RGB filters... or make some crude ones.

If only there were some way to work backwards through this method We could use it to colorize black and white photos.

I’ve been trying to recreate these three plates (channels).

I tried putting three colour dots (RGB) on a B&W photo in areas I wanted red blue and green and then adjusting curves.
Eg. For the red channel use curves to make the red dot white and the green and blue dots dark.

Unfortunately on all the images I tried I could not get enough separation between my three dots to put colour in the picture.

Any ideas?


Ken

It's an interesting idea but I don't see how it would be possible to extract channel information from an image with no color information to begin with. If you were to shoot your BW images with color filters then the BW images are actually specific color information displayed in grayscale, much like the channel views in Photoshop. Now if you have a "Composite BW" I don't know that it would be possible to extract plate information from that. Interesting idea though.

Hee Hee. Correct Goose. I was hoping someone may have a flash of genius and suggest Something.

We can never create colour which has never been there in the first place. But by using curves (or something) we could create three different ‘plates’ to use for the RGB channels. We would never get a colour picture but we could perhaps get a quick start to colorizing.

Ken

That's defintely true and really quite interesting but even with curves we would be "assigning" the color to the image based on our assumptions or preferences instead of the picture information. That said though, it is a really cool way of going about colorizing. It would require quite a bit of oblique conceptual thinking while writing the curves in order to get something usable.

What really makes me wonder though is with the three plate technique, if you shoot an entire plate for each channel you should have some really healthy looking plates with tons of information. When you convert them to channels they should yield some really amazing color photos.