At First Art Photographers Held the Practice of Color Photography in Disdain
Learn about the development of colour photography—from the very kickoff experiments with mitt-colouring to the mass production of commercially feasible colour film.
Today we accept colour photography for granted. Taking pictures in total, natural colour is so easy that we don't pause to consider how it all came about. Notwithstanding the search for a cheap and simple procedure of colour photography was a long and difficult quest.
This story explores the different approaches early inventors and entrepreneurs took in the race to develop a successful colour photographic process, from mitt-colouring and the Lumière brothers' autochrome to the outset commercially successful 'integral tripack' system, Kodachrome.
When was colour start added to photographs?
In 1839, when photographs were seen for the very first time, they were greeted with a sense of wonder. Still, this amazement was soon mixed with thwarting. People didn't empathize how a process that could record all aspects of a scene with such exquisite detail could fail and so dismally to record its colours. The search immediately began for a means of capturing accurately not merely the form only too the colours of nature.
While scientists, photographers, businessmen and experimenters laboured, the public became impatient. Photographers, eager to give their customers what they wanted, presently took the matter, literally, into their own hands and began to add colour to their monochrome images. As the writer ofA Guide to Painting Photographic Portraitsnoted in 1851:
When the photographer has succeeded in obtaining a good likeness, it passes into the creative person'southward hands, who, with skill and colour, give to it a life-like and natural appearance.
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Science Museum Group Collection
Several different processes and materials were used for manus-colouring, which proved to be a cheaper, simpler alternative to early on colour processes. Information technology provided studio employment for miniature painters who had initially felt threatened by the emergence of photography.
In skilled hands, effects of great subtlety and beauty could exist achieved. Withal, even at its very best, hand-colouring remained an unsatisfactory means of recording colour; it could not reproduce the colours of nature exactly.
Photographs could already capture light and shade. What was required was a process that could capture colour in the same manner.
The birth of the three-colour procedure
Before colour could be reproduced, the nature of lite—and how we perceive colour—had to be clearly understood.
The scientific investigation of colour began in the 17th century. In 1666, Sir Isaac Newton split sunlight with a prism to bear witness that information technology was really a combination of the seven colours of the spectrum.
Nearly 200 years later, in 1861, a young Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, conducted an experiment to show that all colours can be made by an appropriate mixture of red, green and blueish light.
Maxwell made three lantern slides of a tartan ribbon through ruddy, dark-green and blue filters. Using three separate magic lanterns—each equipped with a filter of the same colour the images had been made with—he then projected them onto a screen. When the 3 images were superimposed together on the screen, they combined to brand a full-color epitome which was a recognisable reproduction of the original.
Early experiments in color photography
While the central theory may accept been understood, a practical method of color photography remained elusive.
In 1891 Gabriel Lippmann, a professor of physics at the Sorbonne, demonstrated a colour process which was based on the miracle of light interference—the interaction of light waves that produces the brilliant colours yous come across in soap bubbles. This process won Lippmann a Nobel Prize in 1908 and was marketed commercially for a short time around the turn of the 19th century.
Not long after Maxwell's 1861 sit-in, a French physicist, Louis Ducos du Hauron, announced a method for creating colour photographs by combining coloured pigments instead of light. Iii black-and-white negatives, taken through red, light-green and blueish filters, were used to make 3 separately dyed images which combined to requite a coloured photo. This method forms the basis of today'southward colour processes.
While this piece of work was scientifically important, it was of limited practical value at first. Exposure times were long, and photographic materials sensitive to the whole range of the colour spectrum were non yet bachelor.
The first condiment color photography processes
The showtime processes for colour photography appeared in the 1890s. Based on the theory demonstrated in the 1860s by James Clerk Maxwell, they reproduced color by mixing red, green and blue calorie-free. These processes are known every bit 'additive' colour processes.
The Kromogram
The American lensman and inventor Frederic Ives devised a system based on three color-separation negatives taken through coloured filters. From these negatives, positive transparencies were fabricated which were placed in a special viewer, called a Kromskop. Mirrors in the Kromskop superimposed the images on the three transparencies and a second gear up of filters restored the colours.
Kromograms, every bit the resulting images were known, were effective but prohibitively expensive, and Ives' system was, ultimately, too complex to exist successful.
The Joly process
Instead of making three separate exposures through red, green and bluish filters, a simpler arroyo was to make just 1 exposure through a filter that combined all 3 primary colours.
The first procedure to use this method was devised by Dr John Joly of Dublin in 1894. Joly covered a glass plate with very fine red, green and blue lines (less than 0.1mm wide) in order to create a 3-coloured filter screen.
When taking a photograph, this screen was placed in the photographic camera in front of the plate. Afterward exposure and reversal processing, the black-and-white positive image was carefully placed in register with another filter screen. The outcome was a color transparency which could be viewed past transmitted light (light that passes through an object).
The Joly process was introduced commercially in 1895 and remained on the market place for a few years. Withal, the express colour sensitivity of the plates meant the results were not very successful.
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The autochrome
The kickoff properly usable and commercially successful screen process—the autochrome—was invented early in the 20th century by two French brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière. They had been experimenting with colour photography since the 1890s, and published their first article on the subject in 1895—the aforementioned year that they were to reach lasting fame for their invention of the Cinématographe.
In 1904 they gave the kickoff presentation of their process to the French Academy of Science, and by 1907 they had begun to produce autochrome plates commercially.
News of their discovery soon spread, and examples of the new plates were eagerly sought. The disquisitional reaction was rapturous:
The possibilities of the process seem to be unlimited... soon the world volition be color-mad, and Lumière will be responsible.
Alfred Stieglitz , photographer (July 1907)
Realising there was no need to go on the filter screen carve up from the photographic emulsion, the Lumières combined both screen and emulsion on the same drinking glass support.
How were autochromes made?
Manufacturing autochrome plates was a complex process. First, pulverised starch grains were passed through a sieve to isolate individual grains betwixt x–fifteen microns in diameter. Many different types of starch were tried, but potato starch gave the all-time results. These microscopic grains were and then dyed reddish, greenish and blue-violet, mixed and spread over a drinking glass plate, and coated with a sticky varnish.
Next, charcoal powder was spread over the plate to fill any gaps between the coloured starch grains. A roller, using a pressure level of five tons per foursquare centimetre, was used to flatten out and spread the grains. The plate was and so varnished to get in waterproof.
The terminal plate was a three-coloured filter screen: there were around four million transparent starch grains on every square inch of it, each grain effectively acting as a coloured filter. The final stage was to coat the plate with a panchromatic emulsion.
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How did autochromes work?
Autochrome plates were simple to apply. They required no special apparatus and photographers were able to use their existing cameras. Exposure times, however, were long—about 30 times those of conventional plates. Even in bright sunshine, an exposure of at least ane 2d was needed, and in cloudy weather this could be increased to ten seconds or more. Fifty-fifty in a well-lit studio, portraits could require an exposure of as long as thirty seconds.
Following exposure, autochrome plates were reversal-candy to produce a positive image. When viewed by transmitted light passing through the plate, the millions of tiny red, light-green and blue-violet grains combined to requite a full-color photograph, accurately reproducing the colours of the original bailiwick.
In theory, the grains were mixed and distributed randomly on the surface of the plate. In practice, however, mathematical probability meant some grouping of grains of the same colour was inevitable. While individual grains are invisible to the naked center, these groups of clumps are visible; they are the reason for the autochrome's distinctive beauty and for comparisons with the work of Impressionist and Pointillist painters.
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How popular was the autochrome?
By 1913, the Lumière factory in Lyon was producing 6,000 autochrome plates every day.
The commercial success of the procedure prompted the appearance of many other colour processes based on the concept of screens made up of microscopic color filters. These screens used either a random grain pattern or, more commonly, different geometric patterns of lines and squares.
Dufaycolor
Many of the photographic processes introduced to the market at this point in history are now long forgotten. Notwithstanding, one remained pop for years: the Dufaycolor procedure devised by French inventor Louis Dufay.
Dufaycolor kickoff appeared in 1932 as a 16mm cine moving picture, followed in 1935 by a whorl picture version. It employed a geometric screen made up of reddish lines alternating with rows of green and blue rectangles. Color reproduction was good, and it was comparatively fast—although only one-third of the speed of contemporaneous black-and-white film.
Whereas autochromes appealed to keen photographers who liked to do their own processing, Dufaycolor was aimed at the everyday 'snapshot' market. A processing service which returned finished transparencies, mounted and fix for viewing, opened up color photography to a whole new grade of photographers.
Dufaycolor, the concluding of the screen processes, remained on the market up to the 1950s.
A Dufaycolor colour transparency, unknown lensman, c.1950
A Dufaycolor colour transparency of the River Thames and the Houses of Parliament, London, unknown photographer, c.1945
Moving from additive to subtractive colour
As outlined to a higher place, about early colour photography processes were 'additive'—they relied on the principle of calculation together red, green and bluish light.
However, there is an alternative method of reproducing colour photographically: 'subtractive' colour synthesis.
What were the drawbacks of condiment colour?
Additive colour processes had several disadvantages:
- They relied on the use of filters, which block out calorie-free
- This resulted in long exposure times and very dumbo transparencies
- The color photographs made using these processes could merely be viewed by transmitted low-cal—i.e. by projection or by using special viewing devices
What is subtractive colour reproduction?
The original theory for subtractive color reproduction can be traced back to the French physicist and inventor Louis Ducos du Hauron, who explained the method in his bookLes couleurs en photographie, solution du problème(1869). Du Hauron proposed that color separation negatives should be used to produce three positive images, which would and so be dyed the complementary colours of cyan (bluegreen), magenta (bluish-red) and yellow.
Each of these complementary colours absorbs—or subtracts (hence the name)—one of the primary colours. Cyan absorbs red low-cal, reflecting a mixture of blue and green light. A cyan prototype, therefore, performs the aforementioned function as the red filter used in an additive process. Similarly, magenta absorbs green light and yellowish absorbs bluish light. By accurately superimposing these three complementary colours, all other colours can be reproduced. The colour in subtractive processes comes from dyes or pigments rather than coloured filters.
With subtractive color, white, for example, is represented by articulate drinking glass or white paper rather than by lite passing through three filters. This means that subtractive processes are much less wasteful of light.
More importantly, they work with reflected rather than transmitted calorie-free, significant they tin be used to produce colour photographs on paper.
How did subtractive color processes work?
The development of subtractive color processes followed two distinct paths. Firstly, the design of specialised cameras—for taking sets of colour separation negatives—and secondly, the search for applied methods of making and superimposing three positive images in the complementary colours.
When taking colour separation negatives of stationary subjects—eastward.chiliad. a vase of flowers—a conventional camera could be used. The colour filter just needed to be changed after each exposure. This procedure could exist made simpler through the use of a 'repeating back', a moving role of the photographic camera which allowed filters of different colours to drop into place.
A number of devices of this sort were marketed. The simplest type were long plateholders, fitted with iii filters, which the photographer would manually slide along the photographic camera back in iii steps. The most complex were fitted with clockwork motors, enabling three negatives to be exposed in rapid succession in as little as 2 or iii seconds.
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When photographing subjects where movement was likely to occur—such equally portraits—fifty-fifty automatic repeating backs were not fast plenty. For these, a photographic camera that could expose all three negatives simultaneously was needed.
Over the years, many designs for such 'one-shot' cameras were patented, and a number were produced commercially. These used various arrangements of mirrors and prisms to split the light entering the camera into three separate beams, each of which went to a plateholder fitted with a different coloured filter. Among the most successful designs were the Jos-Pe, Bermpohl, Klein and Mirkut cameras.
Carbon printing
Obtaining satisfactory negatives was only the kickoff phase. These negatives and so needed to be converted into positive images in the complementary colours of cyan, magenta and yellow.
Several dissimilar methods were used to obtain these images, the most popular beingness variations of the carbon procedure. These used sheets of carbon tissue, consisting of a gelatine blanket, containing pigment, on a paper base. The tissue was sensitised before utilise by soaking information technology in potassium bichromate. Potassium bichromate hardens when
exposed to light and then, after exposure in contact with a negative, the areas of unhardened gelatine could be washed away to reveal an image.
Tissues could exist produced using pigments of any colour; images on cyan, magenta and xanthous tissues were then superimposed to produce subtractive color prints.
A variant of the carbon process was the Trichrome Carbro procedure. It used a set of bromide prints made from separation negatives to make the necessary yellowish, magenta and cyan pigment images on tissue for transfer in sequence on to a newspaper base. The process was outset developed during the 1890s but made popular by the Autotype Visitor of Ealing during the 1920s and 1930s.
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While processes such equally Carbro were available for apprentice photographers to use, tissue associates techniques were hard and complex. Autonomously from the really dedicated, nigh amateurs preferred to use additive processes such as the autochrome process and Dufaycolor.
The Vivex procedure
During the 1930s, commercial colour photography became increasingly of import. For professional colour printing, at this time, one process reigned supreme: Vivex.
Invented in 1928 by Dr Douglas A. Spencer, who afterwards went on to become Managing Director of Kodak, Vivex was a modification of the Trichrome Carbro process in which sheets of cellophane were used as temporary supports for the paint images. Any modest bug with the image could be corrected manually by stretching or squeezing the cellophane to ensure perfect superimposition.
To exploit the Vivex process, a company called Color Photographs (British & Foreign) Ltd. was formed with a factory in Willesden, north London. This was the first laboratory to offer a colour impress making service to professional photographers.
Such was the popularity of the Vivex process that it has been estimated that over 90% of all the colour prints made in Britain in the 1930s were produced using it.
The tripack organisation
Subtractive colour processes, such equally Vivex, required color separation negatives to exist fabricated on 3 split photographic plates. Nevertheless, if all three could exist combined into a unmarried unit of measurement—or tripack—there would exist no need for specialised colour cameras or repeating backs fitted with filters.
It was the invention of tripacks that paved the way for the development of 'mod' colour processes such as Kodachrome.
What was the tripack system?
The basic idea of the tripack organisation was to construct a multi-layer unit, where each plate was coated with an emulsion sensitive to i of the primary colours. Light would pass through the showtime plate in club to reach the second emulsion layer and, in turn, pass through that plate to register on the third emulsion.
The first practical tripack system was introduced by Frederic Ives, an American inventor, in 1916. His 'Hiblock' tripack consisted of a sheet of film sandwiched between two drinking glass plates. The tiptop plate was blue-sensitive, the film was green-sensitive and the bottom plate was sensitive to carmine light. After exposure, the iii layers were separated for processing; the negatives were then treated as conventional separation negatives.
After Ives' invention, other tripack systems followed, including 1 that turned out to exist a famous failure: the Colorsnap process.
What was the Colorsnap process and why did it fail?
The late 1920s was a time of great technological change in the western earth: too as photography, new inventions such every bit the gramophone, radio and movie theater were speedily growing in popularity. As a result, at that place was a frenzy of investment in companies promoting new innovations.
One such company was the London-based Colour Snapshots Ltd., established in 1928 to promote a tripack photographic process called Colorsnap. It was fix with massive fiscal backing and invested heavily in promoting its competitively priced products.
All the same, despite extravagant claims, the results were disappointing. The negatives from the second and third emulsion layers were and then blurry that the company was reduced to manus-color black-and-white prints fabricated from the sharpest (front) chemical element of the tripack. Unsurprisingly, Colour Snapshots Ltd went bankrupt in Dec 1929.
The Colorsnap procedure suffered from the same trouble inherent to all tripack systems. Calorie-free was scattered and diffused as it passed through the diverse layers of emulsion, so one or more than of the resulting negatives were blurred. Definition was as well poor to allow much enlargement; tripack negatives were usually only recommended for contact printing.
Solving the problems of the tripack system
The tripack system was quicker than previous colour photography processes, only resulted in blurry negatives. The solution to this problem was to glaze all 3 emulsions onto the aforementioned glass or film support. This was called an 'integral tripack'. Since it was physically impossible to separate the layers, each had to be capable of beingness chemically processed in isolation so as to produce an image in cyan, magenta or yellow.
In 1912, Rudolph Fischer had patented a proposal to apply what later became known equally 'colour couplers'—substances that react with chemicals formed during development to create coloured dyes. Fischer suggested that colour couplers for producing cyan, magenta and yellow dyes should be incorporated into the appropriate layers of an integral tripack so that coloured images would be formed during evolution. The result would exist a total colour photographic image.
Unfortunately, the colour couplers Fischer used tended to disperse between emulsion layers during processing. Fischer's theory, still, was sound, and his work was to grade the basis of the research that led to the first commercially successful integral tripack system—Kodachrome.
The invention of Kodachrome
Kodachrome was the invention of Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky. Both earned their living equally professional musicians (Mannes played the piano and Godowsky the violin) while spending their spare time experimenting with colour photography. Despite their best efforts, there came a point when they were unable to progress without exterior support.
This support was to come from Dr C.Due east. Kenneth Mees, director of the Eastman Kodak research laboratories in Rochester, New York. In 1922, Mees met with Mannes and Godowsky and, impressed with the quality of their work, agreed to supply them with the materials they needed to continue their research. At this point, they were working on a two-color subtractive system for colour photography simply, after reading nearly Fischer's piece of work with colour couplers, they decided to carelessness their previous methods and concentrate on developing a iii-colour multi-layer film organization.
In 1931, the ii Leopolds gave up their musical careers to piece of work total-time in the Kodak research laboratories where, with the help of Eastman Kodak's enormous resources, they made rapid progress.
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Science Museum Grouping Collection
How did Kodachrome piece of work?
Like Fischer, Mannes and Godowsky had cracking difficulty in preventing the coloured dyes spreading between the emulsion layers. They overcame this by putting the colour couplers in the developer rather than the emulsion.
Kodachrome is, in effect, a black-and-white film to which coloured dyes are added during processing.
Kodachrome processing—imvolving repeated development, dyeing and and then selective bleaching—was extremely circuitous. In all, it required at least 28 different stages that could only be carried out in laboratory atmospheric condition.
For this reason, photographers were unable to procedure their own film; they had to send it back to the Eastman Kodak laboratories in Rochester.
When did Kodachrome picture first continue sale?
On fifteen April 1935, the offset Kodachrome moving-picture show went on auction for use in 16mm cinematics cameras. 35mm Kodachrome movie was available on the American marketplace in 1936, and the kickoff supplies reached the United kingdom in 1937.
Agfacolor-Neu
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In 1936, Agfa, a German company, also announced a multi-layer color film.
Agfa had been making additive colour plates since 1916, so they called their colour film Agfacolor-Neu—'new' to betoken that it was completely different from whatsoever earlier products. Agfacolor-Neu was the first commercial process to follow Rudolph Fischer'southward theory of using colour couplers.
Agfa's research chemists discovered a way of anchoring couplers in the individual emulsion layers. This fabricated Agfacolor motion-picture show much easier to process. Unlike Kodachrome, it could even be washed by the user at home.
Afterward the Second World War, the details of Agfa's inquiry became freely available, and other companies—such as Ferraniacolor and Gevacolor—introduced color film based on the same principle.
With the perfection of dye-based multi-layer color films such as Kodachrome and Agfacolor-Neu, a new era of colour photography had dawned. The quest for color—a search that had begun with the invention of photography virtually 100 years before—was over.
Further reading
Online
- The history of photography in pictures, National Science and Media Museum
- Autochromes: the dawn of colour photography, National Scientific discipline and Media Museum blog
- A brief history of Kodachrome, Claire Suddath, Fourth dimension
Books
- Brian Coe, Colour Photography: The First Hundred Years, 1978
- Jack H Coote, The Illustrated History of Colour Photography, 1993
- Joseph S. Friedman, History of Color Photography, 1945
- Pamela Roberts, A Century of Colour Photography, 2007
- E.J. Wall, The History of Three-Colour Photography, 1970
- John Forest, The Fine art of the Autochrome: The Birth of Color Photography, 1993
- John Forest, 'The Art of the Autochrome: A supplemental bibliography', History of Photography, Summer 1994
Source: https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/history-colour-photography
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