i’ve been toying with tri chromes, or tri chrome-esque photographs for a few years now. i first learned about trichromes after reading and seeing the photographs made by the russian photographer before world war 1. (http://mentalfloss.com/article/29615/100-year-old-color-photos-pre-revolution-russia )
i knew this process existed, even before i saw those beautiful russian photos when i visited an uncle and he told me you can take 3 black and white negatives, one with a red filter, one with a blue and one with a green and print them on color paper together and make color photographs. i never did this until a few years ago, and i was hooked.
i’ve even thought about buying an big old rickety camera that takes 3 exposures at once, but i’ve settled on an old polaroid camera called a portrait land 600 that takes 6 exposures at once on a sheet of 4×5 film. its a passport camera and was given to me by my friend whitey, a collector of fun-stuff, and great photographer to boot ! well, this entry isn’t about making trichromes using black and white film, or black and white separation negatives in-camera but something i have been trying to figure out for a couple of years: how to take a regular black and white photo and turn it into a color one. i figured it wasn’t one of those things that was super hard, after all ted turner colorized all those classic movies, but it was something that i couldnt’ figure out until today.
i frequent dpug ( digital photo user group ) and have posted the question there but i always got complicated answers. i made the mistake of doing the 10 day free trial for afinity photo ( i didn’t get it, long story short, no customer support ! ) and didn’t get it, BUT i did manage to see interesting videos on how to do stuff, and one was a technicolor photo effect. affinity doesn’t work completely like photoshop, and i have been using PS since the 90s, so i was looking for hints … it was extremely complicated making layers and nesting cmy adjustment layers. the guy made it look really easy though.
today i watched youtube photoshop tutorials for doing similar things. one guy just gets rid of the blue layer and adds a green one it was kind of fun. another guy showed how to make SIMPLE separation negatives. so i took what i needed from affinity ( what levels to put the cmy levels ) and the simple separation files and this is what i did … sorry i don’t have charts or graphs &c but it is pretty simple, and i have done it with b/w files and it was fun to turn them into color photos …
you open your image file and get your channel / layers dialog box, and click color channels. there is a little arrow and click it
and use the ” channel splitter ” it will give you 3 identical files labled red green blue and for each one go to mode and change
them each from grey scale to rgb. go to hue / saturation for each file and click “colorize”
red put the top slider at 180 (cyan ) for blue put the slider to 60 ( yellow ) and for green put it to 300 ( magenta ).
now select the whole image edit>copy and file new and go into the channel palette and drop each file
into the individual color channels r -g-b and at then … there you go, you have a color photograph
or, sort of a color photograph
