Trichromatic Image Creation - The Process

A whole day I tried different manual approaches in Affinity Photo to get a good color image from three monochrome red, green and blue optically filtered captures with not fully convincing results.

I concluded, I'd need a standardized and more automatic process. Suddenly a groundbreaking but simple idea entered my mind. I needed to implement a process like the one of calibrating and profiling a scanner, printer or camera!

With this perception, I think we could call the combo K3iiiMono and Affinity Photo a Virtual Trichromatic Camera that produces trichromatic images. Of course GIMP, Adobe Photoshop and others should also work.

You may laugh, but I like this idea and it tells us, that we should generate at least one individual icc profile for it. This profile will depend on our optical filter set and lighting conditions.

Such an icc profile would help to optimize our process concerning the most important step: "color definition". To generate an icc profile we need a color calibration card.

I remembered, I got one with my Xrite iStudio (formerly ColorMunki Photo, today Calibrite ColorChecker Studio) color calibration tool years ago - precondition fulfilled ... after a search of nearly half an hour!

So let's go and create an icc profile for the Virtual Trichromatic Camera!

Goal is a fast trichomatic image creation process for the future, yielding consistently good color images.

*Process Steps*

1. Monochrome photo shooting
2. Creating a trichromatic image from monochrome images
3. Generation of an icc color profile for trichromatic images depending on lighting and filters used
4. Applying a generated icc color profile to trichromatic images

The following image shows my first "real world" trichromatic image.

This was the story about how I was "forced" to think a bit deeper about my trichromatic process. While consulting the internet I learned a lot about using my tools ... which I'll cover in the next steps, i.e. posts.

Go to: Monochrome Shooting