The bulk of this project took place from 1909 to 1915, when Prokudin-Gorskii traveled about the land in a railroad car outfitted as a darkroom, provided to him by the tsar.

In the composite image below, I used Adobe Photoshop to recreate the process of converting three black and white frames into a full color image.

In the black and white strip on the left, the filter sequence is blue, green and red.

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First, I created a blank RGB (red/green/blue) file in Photoshop that was the size and resolution of one of the individual frames. I then copied each of the frames into the corresponding color channel of the Photoshop file. A simple lining up of the channels resulted in the full color image on the right.

Ghosting in Prokudin-Gorskii’s color images is caused by any misalignment between the successive exposures. Probable reasons for this are subject movement and/or movement of the negative plate between the exposures.

Prokudin-Gorskii left Russia in 1918 after the revolution. He eventually settled in Paris, where he died in 1944. The Library of Congress purchased the collection from his sons in 1948.

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The Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii collection of the Library of Congress has 1,902 of these black and white glass triple-frame plates, as well as several thousand sepia toned and color prints.

Digital color composites for these images were made for the Library of Congress by Blaise Agüera y Arcas in 2004. Images are courtesy of the Library of Congress.