RetouchPro challenge

Recently I had an email invitation from a website called RetouchPro. I joined the group four or five years ago and unfortunately forgot about them. How the email made it through, I’ll never know- but I’m glad it did. The invitation was to work on a retouching challenge. RetouchPro posted a very unusual image from the Library of Congress’ Prokudin-Gorskii Collection of historic photographs and asked that the group try to, well, make it work? …hard to talk about unless you’re looking at the original image.

The image needing work was a single image with three almost identical gray scale images in it. Each of the three images was shot through a colored gel giving a gray scale photo shot through red, another shot through green, and a third through blue. When projected together through similar gels and combined on a single screen, the result was a full color slide. It must have been the iMax of its day. The RetouchPro challenge was to combine the three images as channels, correct overall color casts, repair damage, and crop as desired.

My entry is at the top of the post, and it’s linked to a full size jpeg. It was a lot of fun. The challenge only accepted image uploads of 100 kilobytes or less. That’s rough; any subtlety in the sharpening is lost, though color is still pretty accessible. There are a lot of really good entries, mine falling somewhere in the middle of the pack. My approach was to stay as faithful as I could to what I imagined was the photographer’s intent and creat something useable from a historical perspective. Others took different paths. Even the least experienced among the entrants managed to do a better job than what is warehoused by the Library of Congress. I hope the LOC gets access to the contest winner if they want it. I believe the LOC uses a software program to do their composites; otherwise it would take them quite a while.