Evgeny S said:
Yes, I want Kodachrome! But I physically couldn't get it from anywhere :bang: , because
1. There no labs in Russia which develop Kodachrome. The nearest lab is in Switzeland, but:
2. The main reason: Russian Post prohibits the mailing of the "undeveloped photosensitive products" :bang:
Anyway thank you for the your offer 🙂
Tovarishch Yevgeni
Fujichrome Velvia will give you saturated tones- almost there where Kodachrome was/is, but not quite. For people like us where Kodachrome isn't easily available,
and where the nearest processing station is about 2000 Km away, Velvia is promising.
Yes, some sort of effect similar to that old colour photo can be recreated using photoshop. You can tweak the colour channels to limit their scales and make one stand out over the other. Just keep adjusting until you see one to your liking. And you can start with a scan of an ordinary print.
That old photo did not get that way because it was just shot on Kodachrome. For all we know, it might not have been Kodachrome. It could have been large sheet Ektachrome or even Anscochrome. It MIGHT have even been a shot from a dirct separation, 3-colour camera, a still version of the three-strip technicolor camera.
The photo shown was a print made from the original transparency. To get a print made then, many cumbersome methods were used like dry transfer, carbro, or whatever manually built- up colour printing method. Manually built up means these are prints whose colours are applied individually as matrices- eg yellow, cyan, and magenta components- until a colour composite forms. This allows the print-maker subjective control to decide which hue to emphasise or highlight.
In the absence of dye matrices and wash-off relief materials, we could probably do the same thing in photoshop. Take the cue from the individual colour matrices of the composite printers and transpose them to the CMYK channels of photoshop and we have a starting point.
BTW, you have a great photographer from the last days of the tsarist era who engaged in direct-separation photography: Sergei MIhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii.
His original three-colour separation negatives were recently made into prints. They are exhibited online at
The Empire That was Russia
Jay
