Making a color image with B&W film through analog means

[mehguy]

I was looking into the technique where using B&W film and 3 color filters on your camera (red, green and blue) with 3 different negatives, scan the negatives, put a red, green and blue mask on them in photoshop and blend the 3 photos together. I'm curious, is this possible to be done through an entirely analog process? Would it be possible to maybe use a color enlarger, dial in the cyan, magenta and yellow values to get a red, green and blue mask and expose each negative to the same sheet of RA4 color paper. Would this yield any kind of result?

 

[mshchem]

This is how the original Technicolor worked. You would spend the rest of your life trying to get a decent print. "Color cameras" back in the day had 3 4x5 films exposed simultaneously to produce RGB registers. This was used by incredibly talented graphic arts men to produce intermediate dye transfer prints to let the art director choose what was just right. Then on to the plates for rotogravure printing for magazines.
Today everything is done digitally. I remember visiting a friend's father's printing plant. They used all manner of things, very complicated, 3M color key films, on and on.

Easiest way is to do it all in Photoshop.

 

[removed account4]

hi,
does it have to be done with black and white paper?
you can do this process with panchromatic RGB negatives like you said and printed onto color paper which might be kind of hard to register everything in pitch black darkness.
you can do something similar using your RGB film and making tri chromatic gum prints and I think tri color carbon prints. you'll fill your head up with alt process stuff and there is a steep learning curve that might be frustrating but when you learn how to do it you'll be pretty stoked. Vaugh ( here on photrio ) does wicked carbon prints and Andrew O'Neil ( here as well ) and Bob Carney ( here as well ) both do wicked gum prints ... these 2 probably have done tri color ones.

this guy had a camera like mshchem is talking about ( I think ? )
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/old-russian-empire-color-photos-180950229/

 

[Chan Tran]

It is possible. Expose the 3 negatives separately under 3 different color lights.

 

[ChristopherCoy]

https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/color-images-from-b-w-film.174977/

 

[mehguy]

https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/color-images-from-b-w-film.174977/

Yes! That’s the same video I saw! Except I wanna try doing it on RA4 paper lol

 

[ChristopherCoy]

Yes! That’s the same video I saw! Except I wanna try doing it on RA4 paper lol

That thread has some good responses in it. Check it out.

 

[koraks]

Would this yield any kind of result?

Sort of, but not really. Try this:
Expose & develop each R, G, and B exposed sheet of film for a low gamma with good shadow separation. Getting the curves of each of the film sheets to match *perfectly* will be crucial for decent color reproduction.
Use a developed & fixed out, but unexposed sheet of C41 film as a basic filter.
Overlay the R, G and B sheets over the C41 filter sheet, and use additional C, M and Y filtration to match the film curve to the RA4 paper curve.
Expose RA4 sheet 3 times, once for each color, with their respective filter settings.
Maintaining alignment will be crucial.
The CMY filters of your enlarger may or may not cut it and you may or may not have to resort to arcane ways of applying additional filtration.

I may have forgotten a reversal step in the color separation process, but I trust you'll easily figure that out if you're serious about this. Which I hope you're not, because as mshchem said, this is going to take a lifetime to get it right (and likely shorten yours due to sheer frustration).

 

[Donald Qualls]

Tricolor gum was one of (if not the) first methods of printing color photo images, almost immediately after film/plates gained enough red sensitivity to shoot tricolor (this would be around 1890). If you think registering and balancing three (or four, a black layer often helps with defining the very dark areas) is too easy, you could also try tricolor carbon transfer. That will bring the registration issue to a whole new level, since it has to be done physically, and largely blind, when transferring the exposed gelatin from the tissue to the final substrate (on top of any other layers already transferred) before developing (washing away the unhardened gelatin). For three or four layers.

Aside from the above mentioned in-enlarger process, all the existing tricolor printing processes are by nature contact print methods -- but nothing says you can't make enlarge negatives to print from. Once upon a time, there even existed tricolor cameras, that would expose three sheets of 4x5 film simultaneously through filters to produce a tricolor that didn't have color fringe from anything that moved between exposures (like clouds, branches, etc.). I've seen them on eBay. They weren't terrifically common, but they were commercially made.

 

[DREW WILEY]

It was routinely done non-digital for over a hundred years! - ever since the invention of panchromatic film. But the learning curve is steep - a LOT of work up front to calibrate all the exposures and matched curves. Then you need some means of precisely punching all three shots and having them automatically retain precise registration during printing. I have everything necessary equipment-wise, and even needed dye transfer printing supplies. But it has been difficult to find appropriate subject matter that doesn't move over three relatively long 8X10 film exposures. It's easier to work with studio still-life subjects. There are many potential variations. You could do three sequential registered exposures onto RA4 paper. Or instead of making three in-camera separations, the three separations are taken from a color chrome, slide film etc. I was once in the Evercolor lab which did an RA4 version with enlarged separations, as well as a pigment version. Easily a couple million dollar investment in their case, at least in today's prices. For a home darkroom, I recommend setting aside several thousand dollars at least for specialized punches and registrations carriers, etc, unless you have machine shop skills yourself. You also need a transmission densitometer.

A few people even make color carbon prints this manner, casein prints, gum prints. I don't know if anyone still makes color carbro prints, but Fresson still makes unique "direct carbon" color pigment prints via enlargement. I know of a few people who have refurbished old Devin and Curtis tricolor cameras in recent years. There are a handful of labs in the world that could do the printing for you, depending on exactly what you have in mind and how wealthy you are. There is plenty of relevant info on dedicated dye transfer or carbon printing websites if you are seriously interested; but don't expect simple answers. Not for the timid.

 

[M Carter]

I've tossed around an idea in my head of shooting E6 color and then using filters to make contact-printed negs; while you could do this to re-create the color, my idea was more to make green-screen style masks for B&W printing and image compositing in the enlarger.

 

[mehguy]

I've tossed around an idea in my head of shooting E6 color and then using filters to make contact-printed negs; while you could do this to re-create the color, my idea was more to make green-screen style masks for B&W printing and image compositing in the enlarger.

I've also tossed around the idea of making an RA4 print of an E6 positive (at which point the print is a negative of the positive), then using a copy stand and a camera loaded with E6 film, make a copy of the RA4 print you just made, you now have a photo of the RA4 print on E6 film (which of itself is just a negative of the original image you took). Then you can enlarge the newly made E6 film and get a proper image.

An alternative to Ilfochrome
Although I'm not sure whether the vivid colors of E6 would stay intact this way.

If we had some way of duplicating the E6 positive onto C41 film without the the C41 copy changing the original look of the image, then maybe it could be easier. I'd imagine if we used something like say, Kodak Gold, it would just give a slight yellow cast and not preserve the original vivid colors of something like Velvia 50.

These ideas are making Darkroom work very intriguing (although it was already intriguing before, just more so now )

 

[Dirb9]

To help your searching, duplicating a positive slide onto color negative film is called an internegative or an intermediate. Used to be very common to make one in order to enlarge slides, as color negative printing was cheaper and faster than positive to positive processes. Dedicated internegative film is long gone for still photographers, but is still available in the form of Kodak 3273 Internegative film (process ECN-2, to note, not C41). Not sure as to the easiest way to get a roll shorter than 2000', however, and there's some issues that'll show up with contrast mismatches between the ECN/ECP processes and the C41/E6 ones. Probably not worth that route given the difficulty in getting the film.

All that being said, if you're having fun with this, you could probably make a passable attempt duping onto Portra 160. I would just take a photo of the slide on a light table with negative film in the camera, simpler and faster for experimentation, although a dedicated slide copier would allow for easier adjustment of colors than using over the lens filters. As for printing color with multiple black and white negatives, see this discussion about that very subject: https://www.photrio.com/forum/threa...-3-separate-exposures-1-sheet-of-paper.67353/

 

[Donald Qualls]

Another possibility for duplicating an existing positive transparency would be to make enlarged negatives (working in total darkness, since this needs panchro film) through filters, then color tone the enlarged negatives. The one projected through red gets cyan toning, the one through blue gets yellow, and the one through green gets magenta. You then stack and register the negatives on a light source (LED panel, possibly, which would allow correcting the light for errors in reproduction) and Shazam! You have a color positive...

 

[jim10219]

I've done this with gum and casein prints many times. With standard color paper (RA4), it wouldn't be worth the headache, as the registration would be a nightmare.

I'd recommend also shooting one negative without any filter. If you want, you can underexpose it or under develop it. The reason being, you'll get a lot more dynamic of a print if you also have a black layer, but you don't want 100% black. Usually something like 20-30% is all you really need to fill in the shadows and add more depth. You can also develop the unfiltered negative like normal, and just back off the pigment or exposure during your print stage.

Basically, up until the 90's, this is how all print shops printed CMYK, four color process magazine, brochures, pamphlets, books, etc. You made a life sized mockup of whatever you wanted to print, taped it to the wall, took an extremely large (like the size of a room), large format camera, and took four negatives of the image, using the red, green, blue, and no filter, to make your cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (black) plates. Then the negatives (which would be huge, by the way) would be used to expose your plates which would then go on the press to print whatever it was you were printing. Or sometimes the negatives would be the plates themselves, depending on the chemistry involved. It's a fairly simple process, though messy, expensive, and time consuming. Which is why it's all done digitally these days. Now they use a what's basically an industrial CD burner to burn the image onto a pre sensitized plate. No chemicals involved. They've even got large digital presses that bypass the need for plates all together, and just act like industrial sized, super high speed inkjet printers.

As a bonus, you don't have to use red, green, and blue. You could use any color filter and then print it with it's complimentary color pigment. Though RGB tend to work best to our eyes, because our eyes have red, green, and blue receptors.

 

[Nicholas Lindan]

One variety of camera that used B&W film to make color photographs was a large box with semi-silvered mirrors and filters. It was used primarily to take pictures for color lithographic printing for magazines' color supplements. It took 3 4x5 holders and exposed them simultaneously. This made the pre-press work easier as one didn't have to make 3 color separations to make the plates - the camera did the separating.

The Russian pictures were made with a camera that took a holder with three glass plates that dropped through the camera in synchronization with three filters with the shutter firing as each plate dropped into position. A problem with this method is that if anything moved between the shots there would be 3 out of register and differently colored images of the moving object. You can see this in the ripples in the water in some of the pictures.

Doing it yourself with a 35mm camera might be interesting but getting the three frames in register would be a nightmare. Maybe with 8x10 sheet film and a register punch.

The most interesting color process used just one B&W exposure. The method earned its creator, Gabriel Lippmann, the 1908 Nobel prize. A Lippmann photograph produced true color, not some eye-fooling image made of yellow, cyan and magenta dots. It produced exactly the colors of the object, right down to the IR and UV. It would be nice to think that photographic practice will catch up with the method - maybe in a few hundred years.

http://www.alternativephotography.com/lippmann-colour-photography/

 

[Nicholas Lindan]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/old-russian-empire-color-photos-180950229/

The camera and a rather brilliant photograph from that collection: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/making.html

I find it rather strange to see full color photographs from that era. In my mind (what's left of it after all this lockdown) in times past the world really was black and white and without color - especially the depression and the civil war in the US. In Russia Lenin was without color. And when the pre-WWII world started to become colorized the colors were faded. Color didn't return to the world until the 50's.

Many of my memories are really memories of photographs. My past is defined in old home movies. I think that's why people line up in national parks to take a picture of the same view - it's not to capture a transient moment but to capture their memory of being there. They look at their picture of being there and it reinforces their memory. I think that's why someone else's pictures of a view don't have the same impact as one's own imperfect photos.

Time it was, and what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence, A time of confidences
Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph
Preserve your memories; They're all that's left you.
- Paul Simon

 

[DREW WILEY]

Color prints have been made all along, many of them highly permanent. It was a lot of work once. What was more realistic were tricolor slide shows. I've heard them described by old timers as more vivid than anything available today. Tricolor shots were taken on 3 pan film glass sheets. In an oversimplified manner of describing the process, these became giant slides for three aligned carbon-arc projectors, each with its own deep color filter. Those slide shows must have been tortuously slow, and the room miserably hot, but they attracted serious audiences back when even black and white movies were still in their infancy.

The earliest color photographs were accidental Daguerrotypes. A few survive. Nobody has been able to replicate what happened. It was probably due to unknown contaminants in the chemicals involved. Autochrome was probably the first color process marketed for amateur use. Color carbon printing was a lot more complicated. All kinds of options were rapidly invented. Gasparcolor was invented in the 30's, the predecessor of Cibachrome. Dye transfer or it's own predecessor Wash-Off relief has been around about a hundred years, though now it's uncommon.

Incidentally, registered 35mm cameras were once a routine Nikon option marketed by AV supply houses, not generally by typical photo dealers. No doubt one of these could still be found if someone was determined. But it would be easier just to snap register separate shots in PS after scanning, and then output these onto a registered larger sheets via a "film recorder" or whatever. There are many possible hybrid options. Doing it all film to film using an enlarger is reasonable if one is only working with up to 8x10 film per se; bigger than that, and it starts becoming either expensive or tricky, but is still hypothetically doable. I'd try a tricolor slide show first, if you're just out for fun.

 

[Lachlan Young]

It does tend to get forgotten that before register punches etc became commonplace, registration on the easel etc was done manually - often using a sketched master outline from one of the separations to align everything to. All that pin-reg did was speed up this step and make it readily repeatable. Definitely in the category of fiddly, but not impossible.

 

[DREW WILEY]

No doubt the arrival of serious pin registration equipment also saved a lot of workers from either suicide or being committed to an insane asylum. The printing trade figured this out a long time ago, before light boxes were even invented. Even block printing involved a kind of registration within a fixed perimeter frame.

 

[Mainecoonmaniac]

I think the first color photography is from black and white film. There were cameras that had 3 sheets of black and white film that had red, green and blue filters that did the separation inside the camera. Plates were made from the separations for offset litho or matrixes were made for dye transfer prints.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Before tri-color cameras per se, and mostly even after their invention, the three shots were taken sequentially instead, changing the filter in front for each respective shot.

 

[Andrew O'Neill]

I would say it's doable. I've done it with 8x10 FP4 for tri-colour carbon transfer.

 

[Mainecoonmaniac]

I would say it's doable. I've done it with 8x10 FP4 for tri-colour carbon transfer.

Wow. That takes a lot of work. You're a patient man.

 

[Andrew O'Neill]

Wow. That takes a lot of work. You're a patient man.

Haha not really.