In the early years of the 20th century, Czar Nicholas II gave Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii a railway car converted into a mobile darkroom. Prokudin-Gorskii, a pioneer in making color photographs, travelled across the Russian empire, documenting scenes from buildings, landscapes, and everyday life. The images are often surprising and beautiful. As a bonus, I've found that they are great subjects to use in learning more about Photoshop. You can see and read more about them here.

Using Photoshop to convert scans of the original 3 frame negatives into color images is the perfect opportunity to learn more about important features of the program that many users might not be familiar with, specifically channels and layers. At the same time, there’s a lot of opportunity to use and become more confident with basics - from selecting and copying/pasting, to repairing damaged images, and more.

While learning these skills, we'll create full color images from the 115 year old originals, learn how these images were originally made, see scenes from long ago and learn more about how color works. Some of you may find the images and process alone interesting – Photoshop is not required to take part in the class, but if you have it you will be able to follow along on your own device.

This class will start at 1:00 p.m. on Friday, June 11th, and will be 90 minutes long. You can click here to register.