Inspired by the works of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky and others, I recently experimented with the very old technique of three-color process, also called the Sanger Shepherd process. With it, photographers were able to take vivid colors photographs at the turn of the century using black and white film.
The Process
Three-color process is actually fairly straight forward. Three images are taken, each with a different color filter (red, green, and blue) and then projected through the same color filter when overlaid on top of each other. The result is a vivid color image.
Prokudin-Gorsky definitely wasn’t the first to use this process, but he might be one of the most well-known and he’s the first one I ever came across. If you’re interested in reading more about the history of the process, the section about it on his Wikipedia page links to some of the other practitioners.
One of the things I love about Prokudin-Gorsky’s work is how he captures people in their environments. While shooting each of the three images, the subject needs to remain very still. Otherwise, their movement will create ghosting in the final photograph. By taking a wide shot, in which any movement is minimized, you can help mitigate this.
I had it in my head that I wanted to shoot some of my friends in their spaces. Obviously, I would shoot a wide to show the surroundings and minimize movement. However, I also wanted to experiment with close-ups. My goal was to recreate this process using 35mm Ilford HP5 (a stock I realize now is probably a little too grainy), some cheap color filters bought on Amazon, and Photoshop.
Capturing the Images
You need to take three images. Take the first with a red filter, the second with a blue filter, and the third with a green filter. During this time, the subject needs to remain very still. When I took my photos, I frantically swapped filters as quickly as possible, but it still took about 10 seconds.
For close ups, it’s even more important that the subject stay incredibly still. Even small movements are magnified.
I took the shot roll to my local lab for developing and then scanned the negatives with my Epson V600 and began with the post-processing.
The Photoshop Process
Bring all three of your images into a Photoshop document, select all three, and go to Edit -> Auto Align Layers. In the dialogue box, select Auto Projection and press Okay. With luck, your layers should now be aligned, but you may need to do some manual corrections.
Then comes the combining process. Open a new Photoshop document. From your old document, select your red layer and paste it into the new document’s red channel. Then do the same thing with the green and blue channels. If done correctly, when you select the RGB layer, you should see a color image.
Now because of the color and intensity of my filters, my images often came out too blue so it was at this point that I did some basic color correction.
And that’s it. You should have yourself a color photo taken with black and white film.
Like I mentioned before and as you can see in the photos, HP5 is a little too grainy for this process. This results in a little too much color noise in my opinion. A slower stock with a finer grain would definitely result in cleaner images.
Or just shoot it in medium or large format like they did back in the day.
I did attempt a self-portrait, which was difficult as you can imagine. I knew I wouldn’t be able to strike the same exact pose after getting up to swap the filter, so I decided to go a bit experimental with it. I’m actually quite pleased with the result.
If you liked this article, then consider checking out my post about driving across the country with a 360 camera strapped to the front of the car. Not really a similar topic, but there’s some more photography in that one