Color separation from a single B&W negative?

DREW WILEY

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About 20 yrs ago I had a former assistant to a notable Hollywood photographer visit my office several time both with 5X7 Kodachromes of famous actors and actresses of the 40's and 50's, still vivid, but also many sets of 5X7 tricolor camera studio negatives which Technicolor used to make their big advertising stills for movie promotion. They had their own in-house dye transfer still printing operation, not just the moving image side of it. The problem was those old negs were made on dimensionally unstable acetate film, and proved impossible to re-register for later dye transfer printing purposes. Only when PS developed a snap alignment feature could fresh prints be made; and then it was via inkjet. But he never could market those because there was a right's dispute who actually owned the rights to those old shots - the big Studios themselves, or that assistant personally given them by the original photographer.

As far as generating new still form old Technicolor triple frames themselves, or the full triple sandwich, similar issues. Pretty easy using modern scanners and output, a lot more complicated if trying to replicate the sheer hue purity of actual dye transfer techniques, which Technicolor was a form of. Inkjet can't achieve that.

The folks you're referencing should send it off to Jim Browning to make the separations using his advanced film recording device. The problem with separations, however, is that they ideally need to be matched to a specific printing method - and nobody knows what that might be in some future sense the "archival preservation" has in mind. But retro-separations from an entire movie???
Must have a lot of money. What current black and white film would they use anyway, for that? There are dedicated Hollywood technical sites for those kinds of preservation issues, and no doubt certain trade secrets too.
 

koraks

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Guys, this thread is about the question of making separations for a purely analog gum/carbon workflow. Musings about Hollywood, Technicolor, Photoshop, inkjet, etc. etc. etc. are beside the topic. While a little offtopic banter is OK, please take a moment to consider the actual question asked by OP.
 

Bill Burk

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That’s just it! The answer to the first question is no. You don’t start with a black and white negative.

You start with a color slide.

Then print to black and white through the three filters to panchromatic film.

Two of the necessary contact printers are up on eBay right now if you want a proof of concept.
 

nmp

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There are a couple of things that can be done to put "color" into the print made from a single black and white.

1. Posterization - make a bunch of high contrast copies using litho film (like Kodalith, are they still around?) representing different tonal ranges and then do your multi-color pigment printing using unique color of each negative. This is how they did posterization technique like this one I did back in the day using Ektachrome paper:



2. Colorization - make a positive silver gelatin enlargement and hand-color it however you want. Then make color separations from that and print it with the pigment process of your choice.

:Niranjan.
 

DREW WILEY

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Bill, those posted objects have no relation to Curtis tricolor cameras anyway. They obviously made other things too, The Curtis method involved three different sheet film holders in the same camera which were exposed them all at the same time using R, G, and B color gel separation filters slid atop the film itself. A single lens was involved, and the image split three different ways via pellicle mirrors. Much of the use of such cameras PREDATES modern slide or chrome films, though they partially overlapped the early Kodachrome era.

Otherwise, separations can be made from either chromes or color negs, though doing so with color negs pre-scanning days was quite a challenge. Some, like Richard Kauffman, the co-inventor
of Ultrastable and an exceptional carbro printer, were excellent at it, which is saying quite a bit since early color neg film could have a rather miserable color palette at times.

I have no idea whether the original poster of this thread had actual color images in mind, or artificial colorization possibilities.

But if one had a lot of money or serious machine shop skills, they could make their own modernized tricolor camera using a coated prism instead of pellicles, and with inline coated glass filters instead of sandwiched gels. A few people have actually upgraded old Devin and Curtis cameras in that manner, taking advantage of Hoya's industrial division. A simpler route would be to find three pin registered old Nikon bodies designed for the AV trade, and simply align them to the same infinity point, each with its own color separation filter, and something like TMax inside. You wouldn't get registration and detail anything like with large format film, and close-up would have an alignment problem, but it would be fun and doable without needing to resort to anything digital. In the old days, they'd use three different aligned projectors, each with it own developed panchromatic glass plate, respective colored filter, and carbon arc lamp, to present what old timers called the best color slide shows ever, provided nobody died from heat exhaustion during the presentation!
 
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Bill Burk

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Sure they for the purpose. They are color separation contact printers. You put a Kodachrome (Ektachrome or Fuji Velvia) 4x5 on the platen and turn the crank for the different filters.

Some of my old books have pictures of these things and tell how to use them.

By the way… everyone who’s interested in trying should read up on those names of people and products Drew’s been mentioning.
 

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DREW WILEY

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Oh. Now I see the color filter down in there. I'm more accustomed to seeing somewhat more sophisticated versions even from that era. Hard to say when those were made; but tricolor cameras were in use quite a bit earlier, and tricolor photography has been around as long panchromatic film itself has been. Those exposing boxes would have been considered antique by the time Velvia was first marketed - a difficult film when it comes to color separations, incidentally. Good ole Ektachrome 64 might have been early enough. But pro graphics and commercial printing houses already had way more serious equipment. The master teacher of the era was Bob Pace, himself of printing industry background.

Why those boxes didn't strike me as suitable for slide separations is because that would customarily have been done via RGB enlargements. I have seen the work of one individual who made 35mm separations by contact, and along with the preferred Super-XX pan film of the era, "grainy" in outcome, in the dye transfer prints themselves, which were enlarged, is an understatement.
I prefer to make 35mm separations or dupes or internegs etc onto either 4x5 or preferably 8X10 sheet film via enlargement using a high-end Apo Nikkor graphics lens. But 8x10 film to film contacts are a joy to print from. I might print an 8X10 color interneg made by contact next week, or perhaps the week after. It holds extreme detail up to a 40X60 inch print, though in this instance, i'm only planning on a 24X30.

There's a fun video flick on the web of Jim Bones' tour of Eliot Porter's personal New Mexico darkroom, where he was an assistant. Eliot was trained as a machinist in WWII, so made all his own early dye transfer equipment, which is still there. But later he switched to the gear Condit made instead; and any serious quantity multiples were farmed out to a big NYC dye transfer facility. Most of his early expensive coffee table books with varnished pages involved pre-press separations directly from the original 4X5 chromes by highly skilled technicians, not from DT prints. An exception was Intimate Landscapes.
 
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DREW WILEY

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Analogous techniques pre-date the official Kodak DT process, and include what is called Wash-Off Relief, which is what I've experimented with, and how even the biggest NYC dye transfer lab did it back in the heyday DT. Sources of supply and operations included not only Kodak, but Agfa, the US Army, Color Corp of America, and the Technicolor Corp. There was also a version of matrix film panchromatically sensitized for sake of directly enlargement from color neg film called Pan Matrix Film, the last of which was used by Ctein. That could be revived too if there was enough interest. Making you own tricolor separations darkroom-only style is perfectly feasible using current pan films; but the cost of such sheet film has gone way up, and quite a bit of it is needed for each image. Receiver papers can be hand-mordanted slightly prior to use. The storable Kodak papers were more complicated to make, and involved radioactive thorium.
 

Stankula

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eli griggs said:
I believe you must shot the shot thee or four times with the correct filtration and a pin register, and print each of them together in the same print.

I would nder of anyone here has tried this with paper negatives?
Click to expand...

Yes, you can. It is called trichomy

henri gaud : plat du jour

Plat du jour, suite de trichromiesde Henri Gaud
www.galerie-photo.com
 

DREW WILEY

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Paper negs have often been used, especially in the past. Nadeau wrote about such techniques. Carbro involved a specialized bromide paper devoid of a supracoating (slighlty different topic).
But the problem with regular silver papers is that they're not panchromatic, so for color printing, you'd still need film color separations. Paper negs were more a monochromatic thing. Yes, a few pan enlarging silver papers have been made, but were relatively anemic in density scale for these kind of purposes. But for fun, someone could try it with the current Ilford pan paper if it gets produced again anytime soon.
 

BHuij

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I have a hard time conceptualizing a way for this to work, purely from a "how much and what information is being recorded" standpoint. It's like trying to invent a perpetual motion machine. It's not really an issue of coming up with a smart enough design.
 

Bill Burk

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It's not as complicated as the conversation makes it seem.

You need a set of color separation red, green and blue filters.

You can use them when taking the original picture, by taking three separate shots. One each through each filter on panchromatic black and white film. This makes three in-camera color separation negatives.

Or you can take the original picture on color slide film. Then you will need a macro lens and bellows/slide copier setup. Take that color slide and copy it by taking three separate shots. One each through each filter onto black and white panchromatic film. This makes three intermediate color separation negatives.

Later you put the color separations together by any means you like.

You can do a quick proof in Photoshop. If you want to achieve the ultimate in quality and color fidelity, then it becomes complicated. You will want pin registration and color correction masking.

But if you just want an art project, the possibilities are endless.
 

koraks

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Bill Burk said:
It's not as complicated as the conversation makes it seem.
Click to expand...

Actually, it's fundamentally impossible to make color separations from a single B&W image. That's what the thread was originally about, but it seems to be missed by many.

Sure, it's straightforward to do in-camera separations. It's just not what the OP was asking.
 

MattKing

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Technically speaking, you can make them.
But the result would be a false colour result - the colour would be simply the result of your artistic and creative choices.
Something like an Andy Warhol Marilyn Monroe:
 
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BHuij

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Bill Burk said:
It's not as complicated as the conversation makes it seem.

You need a set of color separation red, green and blue filters.

<snip>
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm generally familiar with trichrome photography, even done it a few times by shooting R/G/B exposures in-camera (though I definitely opted for a hybrid workflow to get the final color image digitally, rather than faffing around with gum trichromate or something).

I mean that capturing color separation from a single B&W frame, as the OP asked, gives me the gut feeling of a fundamentally impossible ask.
 

Bill Burk

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Yes because the original post presented an unobtainable goal, I thought it would be helpful to tell other ways a single frame could be used as a source for color separations.

The most obvious would be to start with color slides and then run out to three black and white frame behind separation filters. Or three frames of black and white behind separation filters.

But impossible? No. There were some experiments in standing wave color process in 1810 by Goethe and Zenker in 1868 and they formed the basis of Lippman process in 1890. (My reference goes on to say the process is so difficult to perform that it has never been considered practical).

I would not be surprised to see there are YouTube videos showing how to do it. I have seen some people showing glass plates in a tray of clear liquid that shows what appears to be a final development step that reveals a full color image on glass.
 

Donald Qualls

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