Colour pictures taken with Leica Monochrom

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Myrrys.eu

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For some reason I had to try, next time I'll bring a real tripod and not a monopod :D Trichromes taken with leica m9m

The scene:
L1502473-1.JPG
The result with three colour filters:
tricolour_1-3.JPG

And an other one:
L1502478-2.JPG
And the result again:
tricolour_2-4.JPG

I haven't done trichromes in ages, I used to do few with large format film and then do gumprints in colour from them. Now just maybe I might be tempted to do something similar in digital realm :) Anyone else with these kinds of experiments in digital world? I know there at least were tons of people doing this kind of stuff with B&W film, but perhaps even nowdays in digital realm with all these monochrom cameras.
 
Those look very nice. Maybe the modern digital equivalent is AI colorization. This is an M246 file colored with Photoshop's Colorize AI filter.

I've tried it a few times, just for fun. It usually does well except for one or two areas of the image that it gets totally wrong. But in this case it looks natural throughout. I think it's a great likeness of my son.

Monochrom 246 with PS AI Colorize by John Wolf, on Flickr
 
I've played around those with scanned film negatives and they can be fun. Even if they get stuff weirdly wrong at times. Of course there's tons of practices of colouring black and white pictures. I feel like AI colorization is more to kin with colouring by hand (painting and pencils). Which I've tried once and decided I don't have the patience for it :D But of course it's similar in the way it brings out colour from the monotone world.
 
It's three exposures through different filters. Red, green and blue. Then they're added to those channels in postprocessing (photoshop in my case, but gimp or what ever works). You need to adjust the individual frames exposure a little due to filters not being identical in their "darkness". In my case these are cheap plastic filters, generally using good quality filters would result in better "true" trichromes, these have a bit too much overlap.

Overall quite straightforward process, but quite a bit of work.
 
I once tried it, using two filtered (red, green-yellow) and one unfiltered picture, since I didn't have blue or green filters available.
then, I fed the color channels with an intermediate picture from the difference between the unfiltered, and the green-yellow filtered for the blue channel, the green-yellow filtered for the green, and the red filtered for the red channel.
works, too, even if the resulting colors are a bit odd.

should do it again ... it's fun!
 
Also you could use cyan-magenta-yellow filters and unfiltered for K channel. At least Cokin makes those filters. Wouldn't even be too expensive. Also might be easier to balance then RGB with no black layer.

But then again doing "real" colour photography this slowly and with this much work doesn't make any sense :D I feel like it's more about your interpretation of the scene and your choice of colours to bring to it, more an artform then picture of the real scene. Considering how easy colour photography is these days. In film realm there's real usage for it, making colour gumprints (either gum-oil or simply gum) or carbon prints with out taking colour negative and doing separation layers in darkroom (if going all analog processes). For digital, it's more for fun and expressing yourself.
 
I've tried this for fun and it allows you to create a look of your own erring on the vintage side. While it works very well in still life photos the rainbow colours if things move between shots is a bit cheesy, not to mention the difficulty of keeping the camera perfectly still if you are out in the wilds. But once in a while I'll have another go, to see if there isn't some mileage in it that I've missed. But nowadays turning a B&W photo into colour is even easier by opening it in 'Colorize' in Photoshop although at the moment the tri-colour filter process beats Ai by being more consistently accurate.
 
SWB said:
... But nowadays turning a B&W photo into colour is even easier by opening it in 'Colorize' in Photoshop although at the moment the tri-colour filter process beats Ai by being more consistently accurate.
Click to expand...

on top of that, I feel like using AI is cheating somehow. but that's just old fashioned me, showing my age.
 
Myrrys.eu said:
It's three exposures through different filters. Red, green and blue. Then they're added to those channels in postprocessing (photoshop in my case, but gimp or what ever works). You need to adjust the individual frames exposure a little due to filters not being identical in their "darkness". In my case these are cheap plastic filters, generally using good quality filters would result in better "true" trichromes, these have a bit too much overlap.

Overall quite straightforward process, but quite a bit of work.
Click to expand...


Thanks very much. That first one is very romantic.
 
Actually the hard part these days would be finding quality glass filters. Red is easy, but right blue is tough and greens ain't too common either. It feels almost like people don't shoot black and white anymore 😅 and even then real blue is quite a rare filter to need.
 
Myrrys.eu said:
Also you could use cyan-magenta-yellow filters and unfiltered for K channel. At least Cokin makes those filters. Wouldn't even be too expensive. Also might be easier to balance then RGB with no black layer.

But then again doing "real" colour photography this slowly and with this much work doesn't make any sense :D I feel like it's more about your interpretation of the scene and your choice of colours to bring to it, more an artform then picture of the real scene. Considering how easy colour photography is these days. In film realm there's real usage for it, making colour gumprints (either gum-oil or simply gum) or carbon prints with out taking colour negative and doing separation layers in darkroom (if going all analog processes). For digital, it's more for fun and expressing yourself.
Click to expand...
One would have to apply a specific curve to the black channel - and the colour channels. Some printers preferred a rather faint black image, with pretty saturated colour channels. Others went for lots of black, with barely enough colour to maintain the illusion of colouredness. Colour separation was (is?) a fine art.
If I had a monochrome, I'd love to try - here's hoping someone else will.
RGB colour separations, being only 3 channels, are a bit more forgiving.
 
There's also tons of room to experiment if you're so inclined. Mixing different colour spaces in digital world, like replacing cyan channel with blue-yellow filtered image, or using cyan filter for blue channel. Or deep purple filter in magenta channel. And what ever you might want.

CMYK takes bit more adjusting for sure, but it does give more free reign on layers due to black being part of the equation by it self. You don't as easily make way too dark image, or lose highlights. I just might order my self CMY filters some time this summer, it's not a huge expense and would give me something new to play with. Tons of creative freedom either way. I have an series of images in mind which is the reason I took this route yesterday (and for proof of concept ordered few cheap ass plastic filters). A way to spend summer holiday :D
 
Still very much experimenting and fooling around. Bit too windy to get it right (but I do like the waves of colour). This rock is where I learned to swim and my eldest kids learned to swim, as did my mother and grandmother. I live around 500meters from here these days.
TRICHROME-1-1.JPG
 
Myrrys.eu said:
Still very much experimenting and fooling around. Bit too windy to get it right (but I do like the waves of colour). This rock is where I learned to swim and my eldest kids learned to swim, as did my mother and grandmother. I live around 500meters from here these days.
View attachment 4837706
Click to expand...
Wonderful picture, and more importantly the story.
 
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