In Search of True Color: Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky’s Flawed Images

I have his photographs as a book, it is really like looking into another world.

Sure there are limitations of that technique, but the quality of his good pictures is so far ahead of everything else... It feels like looking at pictures of ghosts. The combination of pristine quality and motifs (e.g. russian peasants on mud roads) produces such a stark contrast in today's viewer, this alone has an interesting quality to it.

These are remarkable photographs captured using a simple technique... but the writing seems incredibly stuffy:

  "Yet the photographer’s claims of 'true color' elide the degree to which, by virtue of his particular technique, many aspects of the final images are ultimately open to choice, in the way that an adagio may sound crisp or contemplative depending on the orchestra interpreting it."

What's interesting about this is the early approach he's taken, how it compared to other efforts to capture color images, and perhaps the choice of subjects in his works. Metaphors like this obscure more than they reveal.

Those color photos are great. Most of historical photos are black-and-white and we subconciously get an impression that everything was blurred and monochrome in the past - cities, people. These photos allow us to get better image of life in those times.

Also it is worth noting that even today there are many villages that look like those on the photos - with traditional wooden houses and unpaved dirt roads.

Despite some discussion regarding blur and ghosting over 3 exposures, I am unable to grasp how the shown photographs of people have no blur given each is constructed from 3 distinct exposures. The time for the 3 exposures must have spanned minutes despite being outside in sun with each individual exposure made at a reasonably fast shutter speed. How did the subjects manage to stay perfectly still? The group photo of children in a grassy meadow has them in various positions, some awkward, yet they are all quite sharp. How can kids stay perfectly still in those various positions over 3 large format exposures?

Over the last decade or so I've downloaded well over half of Prokudin-Gorsky’s remarkable collection from the Library of Congress in high resolution TIF format and spent many, many hours editing them in Photoshop and other photo editors.

Early on, my initial aim was to clean up some of the registration errors and remove color blotches and artifacts that should not be there but it did not take long for me to realize how truly significant these photographs are; they're not only important from an historical perspective in that they represent a lost era—that of pre-revolution Russia but also they're of great cultural interest as Prokudin-Gorsky photographed a vast diversity of subjects including people from all walks of life. Also, these images are the first truly high resolution, high quality color photographs produced in any number and reproducible format and thus they are very important from a photographic/engineering perspective.

The more one studies these photographs, the more fascinating they become. I say that from experience having edited many of the images—often spending many hours on just one alone. I've become familiar with the subject matter in these photographs in ways the casual viewer would not. I've found all sorts of detail that one would normally ship over but it's hard to miss when one is correcting the image down to a level of just a few pixels—one then sees the captured image in a completely new light.

It's a shame I can't post images here or I'd illustrate what I mean by uploading some of my edits. Also, I've learned much about the color/colorimetry and color filers Prokudin-Gorsky used by doing this editing (it's difficult not to after one's spend many hundreds of hours with them).