"Anti"-trichromes

[illawarraflametree]

As I imagine most people on this forum would know, a trichrome is when you use a red, green, and blue filter to expose three frames of black and white panchromatic film, which you can then combine together to create a colour image.

But what about antitrichromes? From the moment I found out about trichromes I wondered if the opposite was possible—three B&W images on single frame of colour film using filters—but wasn't able to really find anything online... I mean, I don't even know what to search for, if this concept has a name I wouldn't know how to find it.

But in principle it seems you could expose a single colour frame three times with different images filtered with R/G/B and then scan and extract each channel in photoshop to have separate B&W images. I imagine that given imperfections in various things here (the filters, the chemicals, the scanning setup, etc.), what you'd end up with is a muddy/messy result where channels bleed into each other a bit... but I bet it would look interesting. The orange mask might be a problem... maybe on Aero 100 cross processed in E6?

 

[fdonadio]

You mean “anti” as in shooting through cyan, magenta and yellow filters (instead of RGB)?

I would risk saying that you could get these in Photoshop and use them as channels in a CMYK image. Heck, you could even shoot a frame without any filters and use it as the K channel.

It’s either that, or my brain is not working good

 

[illawarraflametree]

You mean “anti” as in shooting through cyan, magenta and yellow filters (instead of RGB)?

I would risk saying that you could get these in Photoshop and use them as channels in a CMYK image. Heck, you could even shoot a frame without any filters and use it as the K channel.

It’s either that, or my brain is not working good

Noo I meant shooting three different images onto a single frame and extracting them out.

Mockup I made in Photoshop:

From which you can extract three B&W images:

 

[koraks]

But in principle it seems you could expose a single colour frame three times with different images filtered with R/G/B and then scan and extract each channel in photoshop to have separate B&W images. I imagine that given imperfections in various things here (the filters, the chemicals, the scanning setup, etc.), what you'd end up with is a muddy/messy result where channels bleed into each other a bit... but I bet it would look interesting. The orange mask might be a problem... maybe on Aero 100 cross processed in E6?

Your reasoning is sound as far as I can tell. Yes, there will be crosstalk between the images for the reasons you mention. And yes, it'll look interesting! The orange mask is not really a problem if you scan the film. Give it a try!

 

[OAPOli]

Attic Darkroom gave it a try @3:14:



He calls it "reverse trichrome" and the conclusion is that is sometimes works but most of the time it doesn't.