Trichrome Photography

The Magazine For Photographers
2 hours ago
2 min read

What Is Trichrome Photography?

Trichrome photography is a way of creating colour photographs using only black-and-white images. Sounds a little odd yes, but here is how it works: you take three separate photos of the same scene, each one through a different colour filter—> red, green, and blue. Later, you combine those three filtered shots into one full-color image.

This method goes way back to the late 1800s, when photographers didn’t yet have true colour film. They would use trichrome to create colour prints by carefully aligning three separate exposures. It’s slow and a bit fiddly, but it lets you build real colour from scratch and the results can have this cool vintage + almost surreal quality.

How It Works

Take three photos of the same scene.Each one is shot through a different filter: red, green, and blue. The filters block out all other colours, so you are basically recording the brightness of just that one channel.
Combine them later.Once you have your three black-and-white images, you line them up and assign each one to its corresponding channel in editing (red, green, blue). When combined, they form a full-colour photo.
The tricky part:Because you are shooting three separate frames, anything moving in your scene will appear misaligned or create rainbow-like “ghosting” (you can see it in the tree of the photo up top). This can be a problem, or it can be part of the charm if you lean into it creatively.

Gear You Need

A digital or film camera that lets you shoot in full manual mode.
Colour filters (red, green, blue). You can buy photographic filters or even experiment with gels.
A tripod, because you need your frames to line up as perfectly as possible.
Editing software like Photoshop, GIMP, or Affinity Photo to combine the images.