Invention Of Photography

Colour Photography

Colour photography was explored beginning in the 1840s. Early experiments in colour required extremely long exposures (hours or days for camera images) and could not "fix" the photograph to prevent the colour from quickly fading when exposed to white light.

The first permanent colour photograph was taken in 1861 using the three-color-separation principle first published by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1855. The foundation of virtually all practical colour processes, Maxwell's idea was to take three separate black-and-white photographs through red, green and blue filters. This provides the photographer with the three basic channels required to recreate a colour image. Transparent prints of the images could be projected through similar colour filters and superimposed on the projection screen, an additive method of colour reproduction. A colour print on paper could be produced by superimposing carbon prints of the three images made in their complementary colours, a subtractive method of colour reproduction pioneered by Louis Ducos du Hauron in the late 1860s.

The first color photograph made by the three-color method suggested by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855, taken in 1861 by Thomas Sutton. The subject is a colored, tartan patterned ribbon.

Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii made extensive use of this colour separation technique, employing a special camera which successively exposed the three colour-filtered images on different parts of an oblong plate. Because his exposures were not simultaneous, unsteady subjects exhibited colour "fringes" or, if rapidly moving through the scene, appeared as brightly coloured ghosts in the resulting projected or printed images.

Implementation of colour photography was hindered by the limited sensitivity of early photographic materials, which were mostly sensitive to blue, only slightly sensitive to green, and virtually insensitive to red. The discovery of dye sensitization by photochemist Hermann Vogel in 1873 suddenly made it possible to add sensitivity to green, yellow and even red. Improved color sensitizers and ongoing improvements in the overall sensitivity of emulsions steadily reduced the once-prohibitive long exposure times required for colour, bringing it ever closer to commercial viability.