Color Photos from a Black and White Camera

Those 110 year old photos look better than photos from some cameras today.

Those color photos from early 1900’s are just amazing! Thank you for the follow-up video, I loved it 😁

Those early 20th century photos look like they're from a 90's natgeo magazine

the 8-bit family is a national treasure, they are rarely in front of the cameras but we all know and appreciate how they support David.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky was a real genius. Today the most part of his collection of photographs is in the Library of Congress.

I believe Sergey's camera was automated to take the 3 exposure in quick succession, with the glass photographic plates and filters automatically sliding into place between exposures. Hence minimal color fringing of live subjects.

"Hey can my dad take a load of photos of you for a video he's going to put online?" 😂

1:55 A cantilever bridge with bricks and mortar piles in a "brand new" condition is not something you see everyday

6:30 it's ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ

I wanna see colour pictures taken with a Game Boy camera

For even more fun, take a b/w photo, then move the camera a few inches to the side (still pointing at the original target) and then take another. Then composite the two photos with red for one side and green for the other and you'll get a 3D stereogram.

Respect for that scientist who Took Those color photos back in 1906 😞

I'm blown away by the quality of these old photos!

1:57 Even when the video ended, i’m still stunned this photo is 105 years old. This easily could be a standard android background.

That's how the Hubble telescope works, too; astronomers take this concept further by creating composites in visible light AND ultraviolet, often the source images are obtained by different observatories.

What's amazing is that all of the indoor photos you captured look *exactly* like photos from the 70's and 80's. It's a super awesome way to get a natural "vintage" look to pictures with digital techniques.

Haha! The portraits with much fringing almost became anaglyph stereoscopic 3D! Just tested it with some red/cyan glasses I had on my desk! The girl do pop out from the background

The Russian chemist mentioned in the video here was commissioned by the Czar to use this technique of color photography to document life in Imperial Russia. The photos are really high quality and include landscapes and portraits across all of Russia at the time. I would highly recommend a search for the gallery of these that were put online several years ago.

Seeing these old color pictures blows my mind

The most challenging technical aspect in this video was to make a teenager stand perfectly still.

I'm happy to see a brand new 8bit guy episode

Well, the subjects from Sergey didn't really need to stant completely still, because Sergey used a "camera" or projector that took 3 shots at the same time, because of that he was able to "record" relative slow moving objects but not fast moving objects, the same problem we have today.

I just spent forever going through that archive of images. It's the closest thing to a time-machine I've ever experienced! Astounding.

This is the principle as when taking astrophotos with non-RGB sensors. Just to make it a bit harder for you, Red, Green and Blue don't have the same focal point due to its wavelength.

Many CCD and some CMOS cameras used for astronomical imaging use this technique because monochrome sensors are typically more sensitive. Putting a Bayer matrix over the sensor to get color in one shot means that to reach the same amount of signal requires a longer exposure and some interpolation is required. Using a filter wheel in front of the sensor means each pixel gets access to each color, and also means you can use specialty filters that only allows certain specific wavelengths through.

I just knew this would showcase Prokudin-Gorsky's work. The people photos he took are impressive when you think about taking 3 exposures in a row with really slow chemistry. The filters slowed his exposure even more.

You can also make red-blue 3-D pictures, just move camera few centimetres between pics.

I'm reminded of a very early attempt at color TV by using a color wheel in front of a B/W TV, and an identical wheel in front of the B/W camera. As it spun, the TV would display the red, green and blue images alternately and the color wheel would show them in the correct color. Due to persistence of vision, you'd see a full color image. It was a good idea in theory, but in practice keeping the wheels in sync between the camera and the TV screen proved next to impossible; not to mention the horrible flickering effect!

I love how people always find really creative workarounds :D

In 1950 CBS labs invented a color television system that used the same "sequential color" system, with a color wheel spinning in front of the image sensor on the camera, as well as a larger filter spinning in front of the display CRT. The system failed because it was not compatible with existing B&W TV's. The system was modified and updated by Westinghouse and used during the Apollo program to allow live color pictures from the Moon, as well as live color close up pictures of the launch from a camera mounted on the launch tower. To make standard broadcast NTSC color first an arrangement like the CBS system was used with a color wheel on the converter camera and on the display tube, then by Apollo 14 RCA had developed a digital system that used (non imaging) CCD's and RAM to store the frames of video then combine them digitally. Color fringing will always be a problem with sequential color systems since each frame is taken at a different time and the subject may be in a different position.

B&W shot through color filters is how the color vector graphics you see in TRON were created (when Flynn has been digitized and is flying down to the Game Grid). Robert Abel & Associates created those images on the Evans & Sutherland Picture System, which was a 3D workstation built for tasks like CAD and flight simulation. It uses a B&W vectorscope display. RAA photographed these images directly off the monitor with the use of RGB filtration, shooting a pass, rolling the film back and shooting the next color record. It was time consuming but it worked and created a very specific aesthetic that's difficult to reproduce with modern motion graphics.

These photos look like they have been taken in the 80's! That is totally amazing!!! Honestly, you did an excellent work, sir!

You brought a power generator to the park, because, well, of course you did!

These old photographs fascinate me. Then I called my brother to look at them and guess the age of the photo, and he was totally wrong, and wide-opened his eyes in surprise when I told him these are over 100 years old.

Cool seeing my town of Ft Worth thru the lense of my favorite KZheadr

This video blew my mind absolutely amazing this is the kind of content I look for on KZhead I’m at a loss for words this was a good watch thank you so much and please keep making interesting videos like this you inspire me to get out there and restore and fall in love with these old but beautiful machines thank you again The 8-Bit Guy

Very satisfying... even with colorblindness 🤦‍♂️😉 The lens flare shot is actually very cool!

Amiga, Newtek, DigiDroid....1988. I still have it, the Amiga 1000, and the Panasonic staticon tube B&W security camera we used it with.

Thank you for mentioning Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky-although you pronounced his name not quite correctly ;) I admire this guy and his work ever since I’ve seen his photographs the first time many years ago. Btw: Most of his work you can find online today was digitally composed from the original black-and-white parts. Back in the days, such a perfect and flawless composition of all three components was not possible.

6:15 is such an interesting picture. The subject came out great, it's got that grainy 70's home video look (the shorts help even more!), and the filter flares occur in a way that really adds to the picture. Very nice.

I did this back in the 80's with my TX1000, a B/W video digitizer card and an old security camera. A programmer friend came up with utility that would take the 3 8bit files and combine them into a 24 bit Targa file. It was fun and color capture was just a little too expensive at that time.

Color images from satellites like Himawari are composed exactly this way. The multi spectral cameras use multiple filters for red, green, blue and many near and far infrared wavelengths. If they combine the 3 color channels were get a color image from the earth.

This has to be one of the coolest videos you've done. Thank you. 😊

I remember having a Digi-View set up for the Amiga and I had a B&W camera and the 3 wheel setup and you could get great colour photos. It was an early Digitizer of the day. My camera had a Vidicon tube in it from memory. I still have the old camera somewhere.

I went to a museum which was showing photos by Sergey Produkin-Gorsky, they were otherworldly, color photos from a totally different world!

These old photos were amazing. Hard to believe, that they are that old. Very good video, thanks!

This was a wonderful, and well put together video. It really helped me understand this concept! Thank You, The 8-Bit Guy!

This is how we used to get color scans from a black-and-white flatbed scanner back in the day. Nobody had a color scanner in the eighties, when they probably cost almost as much as a CAD workstation. We'd buy the same kind of color filters used for stage lighting, and cut them down to size. They were a bit delicate, as I recall, so we'd go through them over time. GIMP makes the job a bit easier now than it was with available software of that time. By that I mean it was much more tedious but not a lot more difficult. This is essentially the same way that old 3-strip Technicolor cameras worked, and it's why those old films often look more colorful than today's movies. Three strips of black-and-white film moved through the gargantuan camera at once, behind a beam-splitting prism and color filter, and each negative thus produced was dyed in its complementary color and used to produce a final composite print. It is in fact this last part, the printing with dyes, that gives the rich color that we also see in those old Russian photos. Those Russian photos are notable for being the only truly accurate and saturated full-spectrum photos the world would see until the inventions of Kodachrome and 3-strip Technicolor, both of which came along at about the same time a few decades later.

Dude I did not know about those old colour pictures. Those look awesome.

Cctv cameras don't have IR for low light levels directly, they allow the use of IR lighting that humans won't notice but dramatically improves the cctv image.

Cool, I love the look it gives that camera. Could totally create some retro-style videos this way.

1. Those indoor pics of Jordan would make cool album art. 2. You should take pics using just IR/UV and blocking out the regular spectrum

Nice, mentioning Prokudin-Gorskij! The quality of his photos is really amazing.

The color fringing actually looks super cool though. I'm gonna remember that technique for later.

Found your channel by occasion. I'm glad I did, what a good content! I feel like I'm watching my favorite arts professor from High School!!!

James Clerk Maxwell's first attempt at a color photo had messed-up colors for the same reason you had problems. His emulsion was sensitive to invisible wavelengths that his filters were letting through. The Cassini space probe used color filter wheels with a B/W CCD to take color separations. I remember using that GIMP technique to combine them back into color photos after getting them off the Cassini raw-images website. Many of the moons of Saturn don't actually have a lot of color, so the results were sometimes not spectacular--but Titan does.

This makes me remember a guy i knew that had a setup just like this for the Amiga. It was in the year of 1990. Just a a couple of days ago i was going thru a buch of old Amiga diskettes and a found a couple of pictures he helped me scan :) This was very expensive hi tech at the time if you did not have an Amiga 500 and a black and white surveillance-camera :)

I really don't know why I watch your videos... but I'm never disappointed.

Wow! What a beautiful photographing technique! 😮 Amazing to see such beautiful results with it! 🙂

Love this channel. Super informational.

Trying to get a teenager to stand still... That could be an entire video... Great job, I love the video!

So glad to see ma boi Sergi get some love, digitized works are available from the Library of Congress (Amazing story of how they ended up there) though the Russian wiki also has a fantastic portal to his archived work.

Glad you are back David.

I've researched Gorsky's work years ago, pleasantly surprised to find 8-it Guy doing a video mentioning his work. I always loved that bridge shot with the water, looks better than most phone cameras and it was taken over 100 years ago.

Fascinating!

I've seen this done with the GameBoy Camera before, always wanted to try it.

Great video! Brings back memories. The DigiView for the Amiga back in the 80's worked in exactly the same way, it came with a perspex colour wheel that attached to the front of the camera. You could get an optional motor that automatically turned the wheel to the next colour. (High Tech!!) I worked for an Amiga dealer here in the UK at the time and had to set one up for a wealthy customer. He tipped me £20, I was 17 and earning £40 a week back then!!

You know what man. You bring back a lot of good memories. Thank you

I get excited everytime I see the 8-bit Guy in my notifications!

5:12 okay, this is the method I need to use for the cover of my synthwave record.

I worked in a photo studio for a drugstore chain in the late 90s. They primarily photographed products for advertising. They mostly used a very high resolution (for the time) digital B/W camera with an automated color wheel that took three shots that were combined in the computer.

I was watching again this video after 5 years and since I’m into astrophotography now, I noticed that the color filters are pretty much what we do when taking photo of planets and nebulas nowadays. This enable us to have bigger sensors that get more light since it only have to capture monochrome. 😄

You could use a spinning wheel with filters mounted in it, and 2 or 3 examples of each color. Driving the wheel with a variable speed motor will allow you to sync the filters speed with the frame rate of the camera. Instead if capturing still images, capture video. Then go and select 3 consecutive frames from the video. The time elapsed between each frame will be miniscule, making movements of human subjects much smaller.

Color from B&W? "Ooooooh, CAN DO! I'm Mr. Meeseeks . Look at me!!!"

I seriously love your videos!!

This method is used in astrophotography along with a luminance channel for brightness and is known as lrgb imaging. Luminance,Red,Green,Blue. Astro filters have uv/ir cut aswell to cut infrared and uv

Yeah, I think that's awesome. I'm no photographer, but I know a few people that would love this sort of challenge.

I am a photographer and loved this video ... Great Work. Will love to work on your challenge.

Very fascinating. It really is impressive how good those old color photos look.

Absolutely amazing, probably one of the most interesting video I've ever saw.

The most like minded KZhead channel I have ever found.

Wow, this photos literally there made before USSR existed

A similar technique is how color separations were made for printing in the pre-scanner days. Cameras with vacuum frames to hold the artwork down and color filters to get the CMYK separations. It was thankfully before my time in printing.

one of your most amazing videos!

In fact, even "consumer grade" cameras use this technique. There is a filter with a color pattern at the front of the sensor, that assign colors to each pixel separately.

This is exactly how the old NewTek DigiView scanner/digitizer for the Amiga worked.

Fascinating! I have a JVC 1980s pro video camera that got knocked down and from bumping, its colors are out of alignment--this concept there makes sense! Fascinating pictoral results!! Has a very retro look!

Have three filters on a wheel that spins at 1/3 your framerate, then have the computer combine the three images at 1/3 your framerate. Glorious 10fps color animation!

This brought back memories of my days back around 1989 when we used an Amiga 2000 desktop and a B/W camera mounted on a vertical stand to digitise artwork from printed material/photos etc (using RGB filters) ---this method--- to create animation and/or Transparencies to overlay on analogue video for advertising . This is very easy and common thing now you see on News channels ....where the Headlines are super-imposed on the video of News reader........sorry ...for lengthy disc....Memories of my Video Studio.

Damn... these 110 y/o photos still look better than what my phone captures

Awesome vid. Any time you have old school cameras or retro video equipment on the channel I make sure to tune in.

This is a good challenge and I happen to have all of the things required thanks to all those years working at EDS. Great video!

I remember using this technique to get photos into my Amiga 1000 before scanners were available. I also had a flat bed scanner back in the 1990's that took three passes using RGB filters between each pass to compose the resulting color image.

Lies. Everybody knows that the world was black and white before 1950. :D

The effect of the different colours being a bit out of line with each other is actually pretty cool and trippy! I wonder what it would look like if you took a photo of three different people in the same position with one filter each.

That’s how we digitized pictures in the 80s. On the amiga, you could get a digiview that had those same 3 color “wheels”. Great for digitizing static pictures, but nothing else

Prokudin-Gorsky ahead of his time! Thank's! Спасибо! :)

Interestingly this method of colour photography is still more or less the de-facto standard in astronomy, both Earth-based as well as space telescopes like Hubble, and also for an overwhelming amount of scientific and medical imaging, this is still the way it's done. Technically *all* digital image sensors are monochrome, there's no such thing as a digital colour sensor. "Colour" sensors are really just monochrome sensors with a checkerboard of RGB filters literally glued onto the sensor pixel wells, it's called a Bayer array, which is then processed by the camera processor to do what you did in this video basically. And yes, that means the pixel resolution of a colour image sensor is divided into at least 3 different colours, but thanks to math and algorithm magic, you still get a useable resolution that is very close to the "spec sheet" resolution. Anyhow, the preference for monochrome sensors is due to them usually being a lot more sensitive to light, and depending on various other factors and requirements, there are many other benefits to monochrome sensors as well. Furthermore, since a "naked" sensor will just capture ALL the light it sees, it means you are not only limited to Red, Green and Blue, but also UV, IR, and even specific single wavelengths of light of interest (H-α spectral lines are a favourite in astronomy for example). Most telescopes, both amateur and big huge scientific telescopes, as well as space telescopes, have filter wheels. These filter wheels can accept basically any combination of filters that you desire, and, as the name suggests, it's a wheel that can just rotate the filter you want into place, and off you go. You can then combine all this raw data in any way you want, including creating natural colour photographs of things. Or, composing photographs that are based on non-human-visible colours such as UV and far-Infrared, or whatever absorption/emission spectral lines you want really, into something that we can view and comprehend. Sadly the latter usually gets misunderstood by the general public, and you end up with misinformation along the lines of "those beautiful Hubble pictures of galaxies and nebulas are fake colours" ... Well, not true, it's just not literally RGB filters, it's a combination of dozens of spectra, mapped onto a human-visible spectrum. Just because our crappy human eyes can't see those wavelengths of light doesn't mean they are not there. Anyway, just thought that might be an interesting extra bit on top of what you showed in this video. It's a straightforward and neat technique, and it's fascinating that it is just as useful today as it was over 100 years ago, and likely it will be just as relevant 100 years from now.

I was also left scratching my head by the previous video. Thanks for this follow up

Just fyi, at least in the UK, 'glamour model' means someone who appears in photos you find in playboy.