An experiment to create full-color photographs using only black and white film! Written and directed by Mike Elsherif & JohnBen Lacy Produced by Clovehitch Productions www.clovehitchproductions.com clovehitchproductions
This video just came up on my feed. I wish all videos on RU-vid were of this quality. Exceptionally well done and very creative. Information and entertainment values were tremendous.
This video was really well made.Surprised it doesn't have more views.Before it I didn't understand the "three color method" at all and the photographs you took along with the explanations helped a lot. Would love to see what else you could come up with.
Bonus fact: The reason why I wanted to know about "The three color method" was because I had a "Colored photography" presentation at school tomorrow and this was the only video that popped up explaining it. Above other things,I showed parts of this video on the presentation explaining how it was done and my teacher was so pleased she gave me a straight A. So this video helped me in getting a good grade as well. 😁
This was put together incredibly well. I'm sure I'm not the only one who wishes you produced more content. If you're not working in cinematography right now, the world is missing out!
The production went mega hard on this, I loved the creativity in the presentation! The editing was so snappy and your style is so upbeat and made this so entertaining! The analysis of the photos in the video were fun, but many of the examples you showed in succession at the end wound up outstanding with this method! Also, it gives a really nice quality using a sharp, but relatively coarse grained film like tri-x for this experiment! Really magnificent!!
Dude I absolutely loved this video, the editing is just so good and it's very informative as well. Well done and thank you for making this! Will definitely try this out.
Hi guys, that was fantastic. I really enjoyed it. And I'm colorblind to red and green! So, what I was digging was the humor, the pacing, the inventive editing and a chance to see more of Harold. Keep up the good work. I'm lovin' it.
It seems that red, green and blue makes up most, if not all the colors we can see. But would you mind doing this experiment again? This time using a green and magenta filter to see if 2 colors can show the visible color spectrum? I'm interested in this because of various 2 color movie processes from the 1910's - 1930's being able to show a lot of useful, but not quite all of the colors we can see. And the reason for green and magenta is that magenta is in between red and blue. The green is used as a filler that helps magenta reach blue. And magenta is hopefully close enough to red to show it how it's supposed to be. Do you want to give this a try?
I was expecting that you would reversal process the film to give positive images and project them on to a screen using three separate projectors with the appropriate colour filters.
Hi Osa! What you're remembering is true, but relates to subtractive color mixing, which explains how color behaves when reflected off of a surface (such as with printed materials, pigments, and ink) as opposed to light (which is additive).
I haven't tried it, but I suspect it would create a pretty realistic depiction of the original colors, assuming any movement of the rainbow was minimal between shots.
The darker set of gels were from a swatch book of Rosco Cinegels. I don't remember the specific colors used, but I know they make primary gels that would work well for this purpose.
Getting the "right" (primary colors) filters isn't easy. There are three specific Wratten filter numbers for tri-color imaging: Red 25, Green 58 and Blue 47B. Hard to get, even the Tiffen screw-on filters (they produced them until lately, or maybe they still do)! I did a similar experiment with some cheap plastic filters, but their colors were not quite right; and now, that I need some larger filters, these cheap filters look different in the size I need. So I searched and already have 25 and 58, but have trouble to get 47B …
If you wanted to achieve a similar effect using a digital camera, there are a couples ways you could go about it. Each color image you take with your digital camera can easily be divided into the three black and white images (known as color channels)in a program such as Photoshop. If you wanted to create the multiple exposure effect across channels, you would simply take three photos, then take the red channel from Photo 1, the blue channel from Photo 2, and the green channel from Photo 3, combing them to produce a color image, but with each channel coming from a slightly different moment in time. Shooting through filters isn't' really necessary with digital, because the camera is already filtering and storing the color information with each shot, whereas with black and white film, the filtration is the only way to capture that same color information. If your camera has a true black and white mode, in which it only captures luminance values, you could produce a similar effect using the method used in the video.
I don't have any plans to do a tutorial of the Photoshop portion of the video, but I'm happy to answer any questions you may have. Essentially the workflow is as such: 1. Copy each R, G, B photograph into the corresponding color channel within a given layer. 2. Fix any alignment issues that may have occurred while shooting or scanning. 3. Use a Curves or Levels adjustment to tweak the contrast and color cast of the photo until it starts looking good!
That was really interesting video! I'm wondering what will happen if you filter only one of the colors? Is it going to be b&w image with one other color?
Thanks Lyubomir! If you only used one photo taken through a single color filter, you would get a BW photo, as you're only capturing data from one color channel (though the luminance values of that photo would represent the values for that color). However, if you map just two photos with different filters into the 3-color channels, you'll get a pretty cool duotone effect, with color combos such as red/cyan, blue/yellow, green/magenta. You can reproduce this effect easily in Photoshop by hitting Ctrl+A to select your entire image, then heading over the the Channels tab and select one of the color channels and copy and paste that into one of the other channels. Depending on which one you copied from and which one you overwrite, you'll get a different effect. Here's an example of one I made with some BW medium format film: instagram.com/p/B2SRRuUlsUe/
I don't remember the specific filter values. I used the darker set of gels, which came from a Roscolux Cinegel swatchbook. I just picked the most dense gels which looked to be closest to the primary colors, as those would give me the highest degree of color filtration. I wasn't too concerned about the exact hue since I would be correcting slightly after scanning to achieve the most pleasing result.
It wouldn't produce color by holding the negatives together and looking through, as the black and white negatives aren't actually producing the color. If you had three slide projectors, one with each negative and projected them in the same spot on the wall so they line up, then added a red, blue, and green gel in front of each corresponding projector, they would combine to form a full-color image on the wall.
Thanks for watching! For the best results, I've found that you'll want to adjust your exposure settings to compensate for any differences in density levels between filters. So for example, with the red filter in place, set your camera to properly expose the image. Then for your blue image, if for some reason it is now showing that it's underexposed by 1 stop, adjust your settings to match the same exposure you had while with the red filter. Repeat with green. That way they'll all be within a pretty close margin to allow you some flexibility for when you combine them in post.
I load all three BW images on their own layer in Photoshop, then create a new blank layer that is solid white. I then copy the Red BW image into the Red channel of the solid layer, the Blue into the blue channel, and green into green. You then have a full-color layer, with each of the three photos you took as the corresponding channels for that layer.
