Really really dumb question maybe..?

[andalus]

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OK, so the M Monochrome is out and it's expensive and super for B+W. Is there a way to stake an image from said camera and make a color image??

 

Yeah, we can shoot the M9 in color and then we can make a B&W image of that image in software.

 

So what about going the other way? Is it possible?

 

Obviously I know nada of any technology...

[brucek]

Straight out of the camera, with a single image, I would say No. However, you could theoretically take three pictures, each through a different color filter (R, G and and then use those color channels to create a color photo. I do not know the exact process but this is done a lot in astrophotography with CCD imagers because most of those sensors are strictly B&W.

[pico]

OK, so the M Monochrome is out and it's expensive and super for B+W. Is there a way to stake an image from said camera and make a color image??

 

Yeah, we can shoot the M9 in color and then we can make a B&W image of that image in software.

 

So what about going the other way? Is it possible?

 

It is not feasible with the existing hardware. Period. However, I'm sure someone will do some tri-color (three filters and an exposure for each filter) very much the same as it was done 100 years ago. Some can't help themselves, just as some will put a pinhole on an M.

.

[40mm f/2]

yes it is quite possible. I used monochrome cooled CCD for fluorescence microscopy and their color is determined by filters and software. I don't know the MM spectral sensitivity (at least no infrared) but three exposures with RGB filters would work. That type of color photography was done a century ago. Nothing new

[adan]

Put simply - every photographic process ever created is essentially a B&W process. Silver and silicon are sensitive to light - but not to any particular color of light (well, OK, silver is preferentially sensitive to the blue end of the spectrum - thus we can use red and yellow light in "dark"rooms with papers and some films - but that difference doesn't generally allow for capturing color in and of itself - ironically, you actually have to eliminate that preference by making the film "panchromatic" - and THEN it can be used to capture color via filtering.)

 

From Autochromes through Kodachrome to Ektachrome and Fujicolor to digital sensors - color photography has always required "separating" the image by way of colored filters. In Autochromes and on digital sensors*, the colored filters are scattered on the surface of a monochromatic sensitive compound, in a pattern or randomly. In "tripack" color films (basically any color film any of us have ever used), the filters are interlayered with layers of B&W emulsion, with the final color added or created chemically during processing.

 

But in any case, you have to have some kind of visibly-colored transparent "stuff" - colored filters - to get to a colored picture. And those filters are precisely what the M-monochom lacks.

 

As mentioned by bruce and pico, you can add the necessary color filtering yourself, by way of three exposures through three color filters. Mostly commonly these are Wratten filter numbers 29 (red), 47 (blue) and 61 (green). The same filters that were used - before scanners - to "separate" color pictures into three B&W images to make printing plates, or the matrices for dye-transfer prints.

 

With the Monochrom, there will be a delay between exposures, while you change filters. Anything that changes position between the exposures will end up with color fringes or patterns. As in the water in this 100-year-old three-exposure color photo:

 

http://www.outbackphoto.com/dp_essentials/dp_essentials_03/color%20filters-1.gif

 

You can experiment with any regular digital camera to see what kinds of effects the Monochrom would give in color. Simply take three pictures, and then, in Photoshop, take one different color channel from each of the three originals and combine them in a fourth picture. See example, using three M9 originals, and "registered" on the letter "B".

 

Obviously, you would want a tripod unless you like the vibrating "out of register" color edges. And even so, if someone had walked through this picture (or there were drifting clouds or blowing leaves) the moving objects would get recorded in different locations in different colors.

 

Color motion effects from in-camera color separations were a genre in art photography in the 1970's - maybe the Monochrom will result in a revival.

 

*the Foveon chip uses silicon's differential absorption of different wavelengths to "filter" the colors and record them at three different depths

[giordano]

Put simply - every photographic process ever created is essentially a B&W process.

 

Less simply, there's the Lippmann process, which in one sense is essentially B&W and in another is essentially colour.

[lars_bergquist]

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An excellent exposé, Andy. You have teaching talent.

 

During most of my working life I had pretty close contact with colour printing, which allows one to see the process from the other end, so to speak. Colour printing is done by allowing the paper to pass successively under four printing rollers, one each for the colours cyan (C, a bluish green), magenta (M, purplish red), yellow (Y) and black (K of 'key'). This last is to put some zing into the deep shadows, as 100% C + 100% M + 100% Y, which should suffice for a total black in theory, don't in practice.

 

So even if the original is a colour slide, as it was in the old days, each roller had to be fed with its own version of the image. The four versions met on the paper, hopefully in register. So a colour separation had to be done. This meant that for each of the cyan, magenta, yellow and black part-images, a separate film positive had to be made, each to be copied onto its own offset plate (from which each printing roller fetched its ink).

 

The business switched over to using colour transparency originals during the late 1930's–1940's. Before that, it used colour separations done directly in a camera, either by the three exposure metod we read about above, or from a special one-exposure camera. This exposed three plates or films simultaneously, as behind the lens there was an array of beam splitters and colour filters. But this stole so much light that the camera demanded very long exposures.

 

The old man from the Gutenberg Age