Shoot both black & white AND color, at the same time, in the same camera…oh, and on the same film! [This works for digital, too!]

OK, right up front…YES, you could just take a color photograph. But where’s the fun in that? This little trick is so gloriously magical that it could easily rekindle your creative passion. And this adventure begins with a short history lesson.

Its origin dates back to 1861. In fact, noted physicist Sir James Clerk Maxwell charmed a bewildered audience with a projected image of a tartan ribbon that was comprised of three black & white negatives which were combined into a single color image (see:).

Seeing this color image “magically” appear from three seemingly similar monochrome negatives must’ve filled the room with shouts of amazement from the spectators. In today’s vernacular, “WTF!” probably echoed throughout the auditorium.

It probably seemed like these pioneer photographers would be finally able to capture, in breathtaking color, the regal majesty of an azure sky accenting puffy clouds, the radiant beauty of a blooming red tulip, and the plush carpet of a green grass lawn. The death of painting was at hand.

Rest easy, Claude Monet. The art of painting was safe and secure. There’s a whole palette’s worth of complications that were inherent with this primitive color process which thwarted wide-scale adoption of color photography. 

First and foremost, the camera must be anchored to a rock-solid, stable tripod. Even the slightest movement between exposures can result in a wacky-looking blurry color photograph. Needless to say, early camera tripods were built like brick outdoor restrooms, so this issue was really a non-issue.

Unfortunately, another bigger pitfall that introduced unwanted vibration arose from the requirement for adding colored filters to the camera lens for each exposure. Remember, you must make three exposures to create this composite color photograph: red exposure, green exposure, and blue exposure. In conventional photography, threaded glass filters can supply these exposures, but therein lies another unwanted introduction of camera movement.

No matter how deft you are at spinning filters onto a lens, you’re bound to introduce some scene destroying jiggle into one or more of your exposures. Ugh, so close, yet so far. The big red cherry on top of this excitement bursting inability to easily make color photographs was the lack of a reliable method for “putting picture to paper.”

The British Journal of Photography in August 9, 1861 published a summary account of Maxwell’s demonstration. In this article, three interesting points reflect on the problems with color photography:

“A bow made of ribbon, striped with various colours, was pinned upon a background of black velvet, and copied by photography by means of it [a] portrait lens of full aperture, having various-coloured fluids placed immediately in front of it, and through which the light from the object had to pass before it reached the lens.”

[Liquid filters people, think about that.]

“The negatives taken in the manner described were printed by the tannin process upon glass, and exhibIted as transparencies. The picture taken through the red medium was at the lecture illuminated by red light,-that through the blue medium, by blue light,-that through the yellow medium, by yellow light, and that through the green medium, by green light ;-and when these different-coloured Images were superposed upon the screen, a sort of photograph of the striped ribbon was produced in the natural colours.”

[A yellow exposure was also made in this demonstration.]

“…a coloured image of the riband was seen, which, if the red and green images had been as fully photographed as the blue, would have been a truly-coloured image of the riband. By finding photographic materials more sensitive to the less refrangible rays, the representation of the colours of objects might be greatly improved.”

[Alas, panchromatic film was decades away from discovery circa 1900.]

Back to today, the rest of this story deals with mimicking Sir Maxwell’s color experiment (see Figure 1), but with a nod towards achieving much better results. Luckily, you will only need three items for obtaining a color photograph from a monochrome source:

1. A camera, either film or digital will work.

2. A steady tripod; introducing even a slight bit of camera movement during exposure will result in an odd-looking offset color outline.

3. A set of three color filters: red, green, and blue. Naturally, your first thought would be to purchase conventional threaded lens filters for this set. There are two big problems with this notion, however. First, the cost of these filters is way too much. Depending on your lens filter diameter, this filter set could cost over $100. Even if you have deep pockets, the second, and more severe, problem with these threaded filters is that they are cantankerous to easily interchange on/off a lens. Just one bump on your lens will render your attempt at 3-color photography a complete washout.

A much better and more economical option is to substitute those threaded lens filters with a set of large, oversized handheld colored gels, instead. You can find a set of gels hiding inside the Godox Barndoor Kit BD-04. Once purchased, changing color filters becomes as easy as holding each metal-framed gel in front of the camera lens during exposure. Figure 3 demonstrates one of these gels being held in front of a camera lens.

Once you’re armed with your new/old color photography setup, either insert a roll of black & white film into your camera or set your digital camera to a monochrome color mode. Oh, and one unexpected perk to this technique is that monochrome camera owners (e.g., Pentax K-3 III Monochrome or Leica Q2 Monochrome) will now be able to shoot “color” photographs.

Regardless of your route (analog or digital), the process remains the same:

1. Make three exposures of your subject

one photograph with the red filter/gel, one photograph with the green filter/gel (see Figure 4), and one photograph with the blue filter/gel. Make it easy on yourself and always make your exposures in the order…R – G – B, as well as appending an R, G, or B to each photograph’s filename.

2. Positive Conversion

Digital photographers can skip this step, but, alas, film photographers must convert the three negatives into three digital positive prints. Other than scanning and converting your negatives, a much easier method is to have your film developed at a commercial processing lab that provides online digital scanned prints of your negatives.

3. Channel Separation

This step is the magical part where black & white transforms into color! Import your three photographs into your fave graphic editing software. In order to convert your black and white prints into color, this software must have the ability to separate an image into three channels (see Figure 5): a red channel, a green channel, and a blue channel. Starting with a new image, each of your three black & white prints are loaded into their respective color channel. A simple copy-paste process can load each black-and-white print into the appropriate color channel of the new image.

If you’ve followed this three-step procedure correctly, once the three black & white prints are inserted into the three color channels, the resulting image will be viewable in full color (see Figure 6). Now take a bow. You’ve just made your very own “WTF” moment in the history of photography.

Sir Maxwell would be proud of you.

Enjoy.