Friday, December 23, 2011

Trichromy

Trichromy is a process of producing a color photo by taking three separate monochrome (black and white) photos then combing them into one color photo later. This process is much like early color photography which required three exposures; one through each of the primary additive colors: Red, Green, and Blue. This means that you end up taking three separate exposures taken using a red, green, and blue filter respectively.

You have to use a sturdy tripod to take three photos of a scene in which there is little to no movement (assuming you don't want any color artifacts)

You can combine these three separate images into one color image using Photoshop or another advanced image editor.

How to combine the channels into one composite image in Photoshop
In order to combine them into one color image, open them all in PS. Name each one appropriately as Red, Green, or Blue. Then take one of the images, select the Red channel, right click it, select Duplicate Channel, Create New, name it Red. Go to Image > Mode and change the mode to Grayscale for each of them. Save each of the three files to the same directory as TIFFs (I don't think that you have to do this, but it is a good idea should something go wrong). Then, go to one of the grayscale files, let's say Red. Make sure the other files are also open so you should have three files open now, one named Red, one named Green, and one named Blue. Select one of the images. Go to the Channels Palette. Hit the little hidden menu icon in the corner to revel the drop down menu. Select Merge Channels. Then select RGB Mode. Make sure it is set to 3 colors. Then hit OK. It should automatically list the three channels that will make up the color version. Make sure all 3 channels are indicated in the correct order. This will then give you full color image. Areas that didn't move should look normal and those parts that moved will have different colors to them. You may have to align all three of the layers to account for any that were recorded out of register.
NOTE: You will get a slightly different look by changing the images from which you took the respective primary color from. That is to say, you can take the Red, Green, and Blue channels from a different one of the original color images. This will result in the colors being different.
Have fun with this!