It’s easy to forget that the past did not take place in black and white. But these photos from Imperial Russia in the early 20th Century are a gorgeous reminder of how that’s not the case.
Amazingly, Photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky did the colorization of the photos back when they were taken – they were not colorized later. According to Bored Panda:
Color photography, in the way that we understand it, was not possible at the time, but it was possible to create a color image for the viewer by completing three separate photographs. Prokudin-Gorsky had to take three separate photographs of the same subject – once with a red filter over the lens, once with a green filter, and once with a blue filter (red, green, blue – RGB – is a set of color channels used by many digital images as well). Later on, these three monochromatic images would be projected through filters of those same colors onto a screen and superimposed. When viewed through a final filter, they would appear as a realistic color image to the viewer.
Look:
See the entire collection here.
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