© S.M. Prokudin-Gorskiy, 1911, Uzbekhistan, Starving steppe
The first time I tried to restore color from scans of Prokudin-Gorsky’s B&W slides about 10 years ago, and then I didn’t succeed very well. The color turned out to be somehow childish, cartoonish. At that time I didn’t have enough aesthetic experience, although I had technical skills. Recently I was interested in doing it again, and this time I got quite acceptable colors.
In fact, there is nothing complicated here. I took high-resolution scans of Prokudin-Gorskiy’s glass plates from the Library of Congress website. Each scan consists of three black-and-white positive images. I devided them and combine in Photoshop in RGB channels. There are a few nuances to take into account during this proccess:
1) Prokudin-Gorskiy’s top-down color channels disposition are BGR, not RGB.
2) At that time camera shutter speeds were quite long, 1-3 seconds or more each. In the process of triple exposure people were a little moving, the camera shifted a little too (when the shutter was triggered and filters were changed). So the main chore with color recovery, is geometric matching. To be honest, I didn’t bother with them too much.
3) There is no definite information about the color of the light filters used by Prokudin-Gorsky. Therefore, when we technically combine the three channels in Photoshop, we get some conditional colors. So we can see, for example, a blue sky, but we don’t know exactly which that blue was. And we will never know. That’s why after technical matching the most interesting thing starts – our personal interpretation of the initial data. And here the only tool we have is our own perception of the beautiful.
In this example, I didn’t spend much time on geometric matching of three frames in RGB channels. However, the specific feature of digital photography is oversaturation, so the reproduction had to be desaturated significantly. I also normalized the white balance and overall brightness of the final color picture. The whole processing from the moment of downloading the original file took no more than 3 minutes.
You can see a big selection of Prokudin-Gorsky’s photos here:
1904-1916. Color photographs by S.M. Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944)
Pavel Kosenko 