I ran across this great post on Ironic Sans that explains the process of making color photographs with the Game Boy Camera (old school, circa 1998):
All colors of the visible spectrum can be broken down into combinations of just three colors: Red, Green, and Blue. In fact, if you look at your computer screen under a magnifying glass, you will see that it is made up of tiny red, green, and blue lights that are varied in combinations to create all the colors you see on your screen.
Every color picture can be broken down into three separate black-and-white pictures which represent the amounts of red, green, and blue that are used to make up that picture, as in this example:
The theory is that,
If a color picture can be made from three black and white pictures, I could use the Game Boy Camera to take three separate black and white pictures (using filters to capture the red, green, and blue values of a scene) and then use the computer to combine them into a single RGB image.
After working out some of the problems encountered along the way, a color image was finally created using the three black and white images taken with the Gameboy Camera (more examples here):
As someone points out in the comments on the post, this process is very reminiscent of the digichromatography process used to make color images from Prokudin-Gorskii’s black and white negatives of early 20th Century Russia.
The Bukhara Emir, 1863-1944 (made using the “digichromatography” process)
© Prokudin-Gorskii / Sergei Mikhailovich
This all makes me think of just how fast digital photography (and indeed technology in general) has evolved since 2001 when this article was first written. At the rate it’s all moving, where will we be in another 6 years? 100 years? 1000?
Which reminds me, do we even exist?
