Amazing color photos from 1900's

http://curiouseggs.com/extremely-rare-color-photography-of-early-1900s-paris/

 

Thanks for posting.

 

: http://curiouseggs.com/extremely-rare-color-photography-of-early-1900s-paris/

Very interesting. Almost all of the photographs have historical and/or
artistic merit, and some would be technically acceptable even by today's
standards. But I see that photographers of that era had just as much trouble
with their horizontals and verticals as their modern counterparts do. (Maybe
more, actually, since I'd have to assume that most of those were done with the
use of a tripod.)

Bob

 

Very nice! A LOT of photos.

 

Permit a degree of skepticism. Do we know that this is actually what it
purports to be? If Autochrome had been this good, why would there have
been Kodachrome 35 years later? Are these untouched? Or are they
photoshopped with some attention to saturation and "vibrancy?" Forgive
my doubts, but I have seen Autochromes before (admittedly long ago) and
they never looked like this. Has anyone "Snoped" this website?

 

Rather than having expressed skepticism all you would have do have done
is a Google search to verify the authenticity of the process. I am sure
that the color processes prior to Kodachrome were quite difficult .

To the others who have also posted replies: The images are so good I
cannot be surprised that there was at least one skeptic here.

 

Autochrome plates need a very strong light source to be seen at their best;
ideally, something like an enlarger or projector - light-boxes don't show
them well. Carbon-arc projectors were, I think, the preferred viewing
method originally, which probably accounts for the scorched emulsions on
some of the plates. But at their best, they can be very beautiful and
'atmospheric'.

Inevitably, any image on the internet or web has been digitised and
processed. I don't think those in the linked page have been over-tweaked.
Compare them with these, from the (English) National Portrait Gallery
<http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/explore/glossary-of-art-terms1/autochrome.php>.

Autochrome plates were very 'slow', and expensive. Even early Kodachrome
film was fast enough for cine-photography, and is much easier to project.
It's also capable of rendering much finer detail so you can get decent
images from 'miniature' formats, such as 35mm film, whereas Autochrome is
very much a 'large format' medium.

Other successful early colour systems were Dufay and Vivex.

 

I wonder if these were from slides?


If so, whoever scanned them to digital has never heard of Digital ICE?

 

The colour is unlike any Autochromes I've seen in the past, so I think
someone has "normalised" the colour, every autochrome I have seen had a
distinct red/green bias with blues being very weak, with a tendency to
violet. It's possible to improve the colour of them dramatically though
with an image editor, but I think you'd need to up the saturation a lot and
tweak the overall colour balance too to get the vivid pure blues in the
pics on this website.

Takes a look at the images on the sites linked to by the wikipedia
article on autochromes, they look pretty different to the ones on the
above blog.

 

It seems to me that various types of plates (or perhaps film) were
for the pictures. Some seem like they were taken in bright light and
the subjects are static so the exposures could have been long. In
general these pictures (on the site) have the "graininess" that the
Wikipedia article says was present in at least the early plates.

Other pictures were taken at night or have humans as subjects that
didn't move. In general these pictures (on the site) have less
graininess.

There are a few pictures where some subjects moved at least their
heads in what seems to be a brightly lit scene that seem to indicate
long exposures since some people moved. About the 23rd picture
(lamp post saying, I think, "PONT au DOUBLE") shows many people
and the flags blurred, but a few (for example, the man in uniform
on the left) unblurred. This picture shows some grain, but not
as much as some and more than others. I can't tell if this
is caused by media used or the decay of the images.


I can't tell by the subjects when the various photographs were made,
but I'm sure many people can.

 

http://www.paris1914.com/#!/2012/08/boulevard-exelmans.html

Here is a link to the orignal autochrome