Colour Photos of pre-Revolution Russia

[St Leo]

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/

Seeing people and buildings of that period in this medium really reminds one of the reality of every moment in our history, and how much the past is like the present.

And surely the building pics are useful for city design.:P

[Sarsstock]

Wow, there's no way to describe how much differance the colour really makes in these photographs. The scenes of the wooden docks, the rolling hills, the mills and markets, and the images of the diverse ethnic population really do capture the period like I never would have thought was possible.

Not to mention the fact that the restoration work that must have gone into these photographs is so good that like you say St. Leo, most look like they might have been taken yesterday.

At first glance I wasn't sure what this had to do with Civ II, but your right that these would be great inspiration for a new Tsarist Russian city style.

[Eivind IV]

Nice pictures!

Here's a nice tutorial on how to colourise BW photo's in PSP: http://www.willshak.com/photocolor/index.html

and here:

http://psptips.com/5/phoman/ella.html

[curtsibling]

Simply wonderful photos!

The colouring is excellent!

Really brings these faded ghosts of a long-past world back into vivid life...Now they don't seem so far back in time...
Makes me sad that so much of Russia and Europe's glorious past is now gone, buried under the debris of two world wars...

These photos look like they could have been taken a week ago, such is the quality and vibrancy...

...

[Sarsstock]

Insightfull as they are, the problem with those tutorials Eivind as well as the many photoshop tutorials out there is that without documented references to what colours should be used for each and every element in the colourization you can't ever get true accurate results.

What makes these different is that by shooting these photographs three times each with a red, blue and green filter, Gorskii made true brilliant colourization possible. The detail in the architecture photographs alone could never be done by hand in photoshop or PSP.

Its just a shame this technique wasn't employed more often the world over. I'm sure it would have been possible then to take colour photographs of events from the American Civil War to the First World War and everything in between. Does anyone out there know of any other instance where this process or something similar was used in photography?

[fairline]

Great pics

[St Leo]

I recall seeing The Great War in Colour some time back.