Making colour video stills from a B&W vidicon tube camera

[old_tv_nut]

Fun!

[Aussie Bloke]

I've been doing some further development with this colour experiment and have added a new dimension to the colour channel combination. I was thinking about those RCA TK-42 cameras and how they used 3 colour channels and a luminance channel and thought of applying this principle to my colour experiment. So I decided to add an unfiltered B&W still of the subject being shot to the channel mix to raise the luminance of the picture. I first combined the colour filtered 3 channels in Corel Photopaint to create the dark colour picture. Then I used Adobe Photoshop and opened the luminance channel and superimposed the combined colour channel over it using the layer tools and selecting "exclusion" in the layer blending options which gave me a colour picture of reasonable brightness. Unfortunately this desaturated the colours to a certain extent so I then merged the layers and ramped up the saturation which brought the colour back to a good richness though because the picture is grainy I got the confetti effect though still a good looking picture. To reduce the confetti I blurred the picture a little bit. On the overall adding the luminance did gave a much improved colour picture. I have attached some pictures of some colourful bottles in the kitchen in the various stages of this added development to the colour process and a digital snapshot to compare with.

[W.B.]

In a way, it reminds me of the way some vidicon-based color film chains reproduced color slides (if anyone looked at some clips of optical test patterns on YouTube - especially from U.S. stations). Some look desaturated as on the third example, while, others had the saturation looking as on the fourth and fifth examples.

I, however, happen to like this effect, and my thumbs-up stands.