Anyone ever make Lippmann plates?

Ray Rogers

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holmburgers said:
*edit* Here's a resource I haven't seen before, might have some useful info for those interested http://books.google.com/books?id=1J...EwBQ#v=onepage&q=lippmann heliochrome&f=false
Click to expand...

Did you actually get to read the relavant section you quoted?

I only got 3 piss poor snippits... and enough energy to fire an angry line or two off to google... politely, of course!

I don't expect much from second hand sources, but I still like to see everything, at least once.

Which reminds me...
Some of the files mentioned before, mostly in French, are not actually there... and those that are, are in fairly poor shape... If anyone types French quickly (?), a good clean copy of those articles would help smooth the way for at least initiall attemps at machine translation. As it is now, they are not suitable for OCR and untill they are translated, or retyped, nonreaders will remain in the dark.

If anyone wants to undertake this job in waiting, I have all of the files ready to send....
 

Hologram

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I guess there could be a transmission image. Lippmann and others observed that highly efficient photographs (particularly those recorded on dichromated gelatin and dichromated albumine) actually do reveal the complementary colors. The image then has to be viewed in a "transmission mode".

You might have heard also about the MICRO-DISPERSION METHOD (see for example Friedman's History of Color Photography, p.25 - www.archive.org/stream/historyofcolorph00frierich/historyofcolorph00frierich_djvu.txt)

As for interference filters, I believe there have been attempts making them by means of Lippmann photography. Nowadays, this can be done with holography in a much easier way.
 

Marco B

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Hologram said:
You might have heard also about the MICRO-DISPERSION METHOD (see for example Friedman's History of Color Photography, p.25 - www.archive.org/stream/historyofcolorph00frierich/historyofcolorph00frierich_djvu.txt)
Click to expand...

Just for reference, there is also a full scanned PDF file of 73MB of the same book available on the Internet Archive site:

http://www.archive.org/download/historyofcolorph00frierich/historyofcolorph00frierich.pdf

Since there are figures and even some mathematical equations in the document, this will be more useful for reading.

Marco
 

Lionel1972

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Hi Ray,

I've discovered this thread only today. I'm fascinated with early color photography technologies such as Autochromes, so I'm extreemly excited to discover there was another process that seems to be even older and more accurate (color rendition wise) than Autochromes. I'm French and studied Physics for a while at College, so I would be happy to try to translate into English the french papers you cite. I'm not a professional translater and I may need some time as my free time is limited and already pretty busy but since this project sounds so exciting I'll do my best to be fast and effective.
 

R Shaffer

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I downloaded that book and spent some time browsing the chapters. Quite fascinating for those interested historical color processes.

Thanks for the link.
 

holmburgers

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Ray Rogers, the link didn't work? The link basically goes to the last relevant page, you need to go back several chapters for the goods. There's some really good stuff in there. Apparently, in theory, a Lippmann should transmit the complementary colors of what it reflects. R Shaffer, do you notice this at all in your examples?

Also, it says that pictures made w/o the mercury reflector are "necessarily dull". Bummer considering that's what we're doing. Lastly, it talks about the possibility of reproducing Lippmann photographs, particularly by projection onto another plate, which is the first I've heard of this. I don't think it's effective in practice however. Anyways, I highly recommend reading it, it's the best historical overview on the topic that I've read to date.

And lastly, I can only say that I strongly encourage Lionel1972 to get with Ray Rogers and translate those files. That would be truly incredible, and might make these papers available to English speakers for the first time! I'll do anything to facilitate, although I don't know what that would be, other than applauding from the side lines.
 

Lionel1972

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Hi holmburgers,

I've just browsed one of the French files : "Manuel de photochromie interférentielle" by A. BERTHIER puplished in 1895. It confirms the "necessarily dull" aspect of pictures made without mercure reflector; it gives different receipes to make a proper emulsion, how to apply it, how to modify it in order to make it faster without losing the colors. It also hints to some directions for amateurs to experiment and find ways to improve the process (like using 2 different types of emulsions one on top of the other) or using wet collodion. Translating all this is quite a lot of work, I didn't realize that at first. I might need some help depending on how many of those papers needs to be translated. Maybe I'll make a post on the French forum.
 
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holmburgers

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Sure, whatever I can do to help, however, I don't speak French unfortunately.

Indeed, I thought your volunteering was quite ambitious!

However, as Ray Rogers said, perhaps just typing out the text in French would make it more suitable for OCR (optical character recognition) and thus, automated translation.

Let me know. And very interesting, using 2 diff. types of emulsions stacked!
 

Photo Engineer

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Automated translation is still rather poor. French friends and I have had a good laugh over some translations of Kodak reports that were weird to say the least. Technical terms are the worst.

PE
 

Hologram

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Please take a look at GALLICA (http://gallica.bnf.fr/). Some of the articles I had put online on the holography forum used to be available at their site. In the meantime (I may have stopped looking for Lippmann resources around 2004 or so) they put a bunch of interesting books/papers touching on Lippmann photography online. I'm particularly thinking of the BULLETIN DE LA SOCIETE PHOTOGRAPHIQUE - incidentally, that journal is a real treasure for anyone interested in "alternative photography".
 

Hologram

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Ray, I'll try to upload those files on a different server soon.
My apologies for the poor quality of those files - they're mostly copied from old books (in poor shape) at the library.

Speaking of translations, you might try to make the German texts available to a broader audience. For example, Neuhauss' journal, which I transcripted, is there in a purely digital format.
 

Hologram

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I guess the problem is a "holographic" one. In order to get those complementary colors the recording medium needs to have high index modulation (without making it overly complicated, it means a very thin recording layer can produce high diffraction efficiency).

holmburgers said:
Also, it says that pictures made w/o the mercury reflector are "necessarily dull".
Click to expand...

That's exactly the point. Speaking of holography (my main area of interest) again, more precisely of the making of a reflection hologram, there's a correlation between the beam ratio (the beam hitting the plate directly and the one from the rear side) and diffraction efficiency. In order to get high modulation the beam ratio ideally has to be 1:1. Obviously, in the Lippmann case without a mercury (or alike) reflector this is difficult to achieve.

In practice, I've seen the complementary color thing in holography only on one home made silver halide emulsion that had quite a high amount of silver. That would make sense, given the high refractive index of silver bromide.
With high index modulation recording materials like DCG (dichromated gelatin etc.) however, that effect can be achieved pretty easily.
 

Lionel1972

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I agree with PE on his doubts about automated translation of those old technical papers.
But first give me a list of priority for the papers you think would be most interesting and I'll try to start with them soon.
 

Marco B

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For those like myself who didn't initially understand what files "need translation", I guess you mean this Holowiki link posted before in the thread:

http://www.holowiki.com/index.php/Lippmann_Papers

Before you get overexcited, some of the links are dead (404 not found)... but looking at a few of the remaining articles, I think it would be a gigantic job to have it all translated... this is not something done during one "high tea" session

holmburgers said:
I'll do anything to facilitate, although I don't know what that would be, other than applauding from the side lines.
Click to expand...

Pay for a professional translator?

Marco
 

R Shaffer

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I studied my first set of plates a fair bit before painting the back black. Mostly they looked red and I included an image in my post after my initial modest success. I looked back thru the images I made of the plates before blacking and one may be showing a complementary color. It was a heavily overexposed plate that shows strong blue ( solarized ) in the blacked plate and strong red transmitted in the same locations. I attached a copy of the image. But I have not noticed any other similar effects.

As far as the plates being dull. Well that is OK by me. When I wanted to try this process out, it was because I was fascinated by the idea that a light wave could be recorded in an emulsion. And the proof of this was a color image reflected back at me. Incredible!!! That I could, with my camera and in my laundry room, record something that is only 200nm to 375nm in size.

As a comparison the average human hair is 0.1mm and you would have to divide that human hair 500 times to get the half wave length of violet light.

Science geek fun more so than photo geek fun, but add them together and that is seriously geeky fun
 

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Ray Rogers

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Lionel,

This is wonderful.

Hopefully you have a lot of Stamina
I meant endurance, not multiple Stamens... I wonder if that's where "stamina" comes from

Anyway I am sorry if I was slow in responding... the last two days I have been studying electronics & learning how to hack some new commercial circuits to increase the efficiency of my own photons

Well, sorry if I left you hanging.

I will PM you soon.

To All about translations...
Yes there is a lot of material...
but my idea is that some of us have more time than money, and there are probably some of us who want to participate, & might be able to donate time, typing or translations, but not really want to make these sort of photograps....

And Google machine translation has improved, I hear.

Besides, quality depends a lot on the software... some transltion companies here run everything through machines first and start from there now.

The offer of translation was an unexpected plus.
A large task, but lets not discourage anyone from any forward movement.
One step at a time is OK.

It is a standing (if not long term) project.

Hologram, No need to apologize!
It is surlely not your fault; Sometimes the copy machines we are forced to use are poor, sometimes the publications themselves are just not robust enough to give
"nice" copies so many years down the road.

I will check the link you just gave with the list of 404s (?) to see if some can be eliminated.

By the way, thanks again for making them available in one place, in the first place.

Ray
 
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holmburgers

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Ahh, this makes the Lippmann:Hologram analog more clear... the reflection is like the reference beam (or vice versa?) in a laser hologram and ideally it's strength should be as strong as the illumination beam (which is impossible in practice, I would assume, but cool!)

The whole complementary colors thing is interesting, and I guess it makes sense that they'd appear this way thru transmission. If we get true colors by reflection, then every other color is being transmitted, thus, we get the complement.

This is seriously geeky fun. While the rest of the world watches "Lost" or something, we're hunting down and reading scientific papers from 100 years ago on an obscure method of creating something so easily achievable today with zero effort. It's great

Now, R Shaffer, am I seeing things, or is there a sliver of true color in the picture you just posted?? The palm appears to be green, near the fringe of the processed portion, by the fingerprint..
 

Ray Rogers

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I think it ma be more a problem of my accessing google from a site in Japan rather than from stateside... it sounds like you were able to actually read full pages... I will see if I can supply a sample of what I get when I try it....

Try:
http://books.google.com/books?id=1J...EwBQ#v=onepage&q=lippmann heliochrome&f=false

or maybe the attachment if that worked....

no, that didnt work.

oh well, suffice it to say that I only get tiny "tunnel vision" or post-it type snippits... which are even more than... less than useless.
 
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Lionel1972

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Thanks for your warm and supportive responses.
Which type of papers would you be interested the most of at first? The historical original presentations of the interferential process by Gabriel Lippmann papers? Or later documents like Berthier's handbook and other synthetic works including modern articles and publications about the Lippmann color photography process?
 

Ray Rogers

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Well, I tend to try to start with the oldest material and slowly work my way up... for an Evolutionary or... "Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny" approach.

BUT I think in this case, it may be wiser to tackle the smaller files first... that way, any special vocabulary or concepts will have time to "firm up", and later pages/papers may often be a repetition of earlier material....

OTOH, Hologram might have a better grasp of which papers might be of greater immediate or intellectual use... in any case, it is intuitive that one who can not read the material is not necessarially the best person to do the triage!
 

holmburgers

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Ray Rogers, I don't know what's wrong, because that link takes me to page 59 and I can go either direction from there. Hmmm....

I often find the older papers more interesting personally. Do we have a list of all the available files? Some authors/experimenters have been more successful or renowned in their work. I've seen references to authors who were either barking up the wrong tree or discredited by others. Specifically, IIRC, F.E. Ives had some opinions expressed in one of his papers. I think it was Cajal who he referred to. Anyways, I would vote for the older/more historical papers first.

That's my two cents!
 

Ray Rogers

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Holmburgers,
Yes, I have run into this problem before... Google in different countries "offer" different sampling...
Sometimes, local versions of eg a good web service gets "regionalized" to the point it becomes a BEAST.

If I find out who/where "google" is here, I will try to find a way around the problem....

Are there a lot of interesting pages?
If there are only a few pages,
Can you print (or make screen prints) of the good stuff?

Ray
 
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