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Author Topic: 100 year old color pictures  (Read 11195 times)

bjanes

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Re: 100 year old color pictures
« Reply #20 on: May 09, 2016, 12:32:58 pm »

And you could say the same about many, many color photo's taken before say 1976 or so (Bryce Bayer's patent U.S. Patent No. 3,971,065). This has what to do with color management?

Perhaps that we overemphasize the wonders of color management. Early photographers got by without it.  :)

Bill
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digitaldog

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Re: 100 year old color pictures
« Reply #21 on: May 09, 2016, 12:36:45 pm »

Perhaps that we overemphasize the wonders of color management. Early photographers got by without it.  :)
Because there were no numbers used to define colors! Color management is simply number management. Without color management, R8/B56/G79 is meaningless. With it, R8/B56/G79 in sRGB now defines a solid color.
Color management isn't at all necessary today either, if you can edit, print, edit print and run yourself into circles until you get the print (on a press; expensive, or otherwise) you desire! You can do all your editing on a grayscale display.
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Mark D Segal

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Re: 100 year old color pictures
« Reply #22 on: May 09, 2016, 05:34:24 pm »

Perhaps that we overemphasize the wonders of color management. Early photographers got by without it.  :)

Bill

Sure they did; but then was then and now is now. In those days the standards and expectations of automatic. inter-device, reliability and repeatability for photographic colour reproduction  were not so exacting as they are nowadays. Recall the adage, all too true for technology as for other things, that supply creates its own demand.
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GWGill

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Re: 100 year old color pictures
« Reply #23 on: May 09, 2016, 08:13:38 pm »

Because there were no numbers used to define colors! Color management is simply number management.
Color management for film was done in the research lab using chemical processes. The art of creating a new photographic film process was to figure out how to get all the photo and chemical mechanisms balanced in such a way that a pleasing image was the result.
Appendix C of Giorgianni & Madden's "Digital Color Management, Encoding Solutions" has a good overview of this.
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digitaldog

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Re: 100 year old color pictures
« Reply #24 on: May 09, 2016, 08:31:11 pm »

Color management for film was done in the research lab using chemical processes. The art of creating a new photographic film process was to figure out how to get all the photo and chemical mechanisms balanced in such a way that a pleasing image was the result.
Appendix C of Giorgianni & Madden's "Digital Color Management, Encoding Solutions" has a good overview of this.
I have a copy. That's interesting stuff (especially the part on why color negs are orange) but I'm not seeing much about management of color and much about how the film(s) work.
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tom b

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Re: 100 year old color pictures
« Reply #25 on: May 09, 2016, 09:06:54 pm »

I seem to keep butting my head against a wall. Albert Kahn (amongst other things) commisioned the first colour photographs of America. The videos are educational, just saying…

My last comment on the subject.

Frustrated,

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Tom Brown

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Re: 100 year old color pictures
« Reply #26 on: May 10, 2016, 01:07:04 am »

That's interesting stuff (especially the part on why color negs are orange) but I'm not seeing much about management of color and much about how the film(s) work.
Creating a 3x3 transformation matrix out of chemical and optical interaction of film layers is what I would regard as the color management of the time. It's not end user color management no.
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AlterEgo

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Re: 100 year old color pictures
« Reply #27 on: May 10, 2016, 02:21:29 am »

Albert Kahn (amongst other things) commisioned ___the first colour photographs of America__.

not exactly

http://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/2010/01/the-1906-san-francisco-quake-in-color.html

and then Kahn was not a photographer himself

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tom b

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Re: 100 year old color pictures
« Reply #28 on: May 11, 2016, 02:59:13 pm »

And yet pedants seems to be the first word that comes to mind.

Cheers,
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Tom Brown

AlterEgo

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Re: 100 year old color pictures
« Reply #29 on: May 11, 2016, 03:21:19 pm »

And yet pedants seems to be the first word that comes to mind.

thank you for honestly acknowledging your factual errors in so eloquent way...
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langier

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Re: 100 year old color pictures
« Reply #30 on: May 12, 2016, 04:44:48 am »

Though early attempts at color photograph started sometime in the mid 1860s as I recall with three-plates for three colors, the Autochrome by the Lumiere brothers in Paris at the start of the 20th century has a charm all its own. Imaging using R-G-B-dyed potato starch granules to make this thing work! It wasn't until the 1980s that Polaroid brought out their instant color slide work with an RGB screen on top of black-and-white positive file that this older tech evolved was revitalized just prior to the age of digital.

After autochrome came the 3-shot cameras using prisms and mainly used in the studio for color during the first half of the 20th century until chromogenic films, stat cameras and eventually PMT scanner and laser film plotters took hold in the 1970s and 1980s.

Of course the Bayer-arrayed sensors we use today are the modern version of Autochrome. Early tech evolved and cycled into our current digital photography.

What a rich history in both photography and tech you have shared with us!
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tom b

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Re: 100 year old color pictures
« Reply #31 on: May 14, 2016, 10:54:06 am »

thank you for honestly acknowledging your factual errors in so eloquent way...

I can be a pedant too. Sentences start with a capital. You seem to be missing an a. An ellipsis is a character … not three points.

Something to think about.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/02/the-dawn-of-the-color-photograph-albert-kahns-catalog-of-humanity/253583/

Cheers,

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Tom Brown

Ernst Dinkla

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Re: 100 year old color pictures
« Reply #32 on: May 22, 2016, 05:06:33 am »

Years ago I bought this book secondhand:
http://www.amazon.com/Century-Color-Louis-Walton-Sipley/dp/B000OM05CC

Fascinating story about early color photography and the parallel development of color printing. Roughly describing the period before 1950. Early color photography inventions. Color management tuned by chemistry and standards for CMYK printing ink colors. The first color theories and color models. Not to forget the guys that made  and tweaked the four color separation films. And way more.

Several pages printed with the processes described in the book. A photo of a dinner in Philadelphia with the brothers Lumière, Stieglitz, brothers Levy (halftone screening inventors), Goldensky, Yarnal Abbott, Beck of the Beck Engraving Company and more important color gurus of that period. Think what it would have been to sit at that table and listen to the conversation.

The first chapter of the book has the title "There is always a background". We shouldn't forget that.


Met vriendelijke groet, Ernst

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Simon Garrett

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Re: 100 year old color pictures
« Reply #33 on: May 22, 2016, 10:45:40 am »

Of course, for a better understanding of the history of colour photography one should look here.
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Mark D Segal

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Re: 100 year old color pictures
« Reply #34 on: May 22, 2016, 11:33:53 am »

Of course, for a better understanding of the history of colour photography one should look here.

Hilarious!
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Mark D Segal (formerly MarkDS)
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donbga

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Re: 100 year old color pictures
« Reply #35 on: May 23, 2016, 09:46:07 am »

Of course, for a better understanding of the history of colour photography one should look here.

Someone please pass the butter. I can smell the corn.
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