The search for ways of making photographs in colour resulted in a succession of brilliant ideas, painstaking experiments and some lucky accidents. The foundation upon which the mainstream of colour photography was based was the divisibility of white light. Sir Isaac Newton discovered that white light was divisible and thought that one would have to use seven hues preferably and not fewer than five primaries to add together to make white light, certainly not only three! It was Young, Helmholz and Maxwell who led to the use of the modern three primaries red, green and blue to reconstruct all the colours we can see in the world around us.

However it was not until 1861 that Maxwell was able to demonstrate the principle of modern colour photography, namely that the trichromatic process consisted of taking three pictures each with the light of one of the three primaries, red, green and blue, and he used three projectors, each with a different coloured negative, focused onto one screen to create one positive image. Having made this discovery in the laboratory he left it to others to develop commercially viable sensitized film, and at first, plates could only be sensitized to blue and violet light.

It was a German chemist, W.H. Vogel, in 1873, who discovered silver bromide crystals and made the chance discovery that plates accidentally containing a certain dye were sensitive to green light. From this the search began for a whole variety of synthetic dyes to be put into photographic emulsions. By the end of the century here and abroad chemists had made dyes sensitive to almost any range of colours.

The inventor Duhauron formed the four main ideas that became the basis of one or other of all successful processes. These were: 1) the one shot camera, for simplifying the taking of the three negatives 2) the three colour printing process 3) the tri-pack, and 4) the mosaic screen plate which was the simplest of the processes and is still being used today. Duhauron showed how the coloured photographic image could be printed separately in magenta, cyan and yellow and the three transparencies superimposed, and he also showed how colour positives could be printed if the negatives taken through red, green and blue filters were printed each in its complementary colour. The process could be combined with the half-tone photomechanical printing process and used for colour illustrations in books. Soon after, new discoveries in methods of producing colour positive images made photography accessible to the general public.

Duhauron’s invention of the tri-pack made it possible for the photographer to make three negatives at one exposure. Other chemists, Fischer and Siegrist in Germany and Mannes and Godowsky in the USA, perfected the coating of the three emulsions on top of one another calling it the monopack.

The ordinary amateur photographer were still not able to operate satisfactorily until research chemists from the German firm of Meister, Lucius and Brünning had been able to prepare special sensitizing dyes. The first really commercial process for making a pack for the amateur was that of the Lumiére Autochrome plate. Many further improvements were made later in the 20th century.

DP

Bibliography

COKE, van D. (1973) The Painter and the Photograph from Delacroix to Warhol. Albugnerque: Uni. New Mexico.

FEININGER, A. (1965) On Color. Modern Photographer, 1965. Andreas Feininger was one of the great painters of the early 20th century.

GERNSHEIM, H. (1963) History of Photography.

HUNT, RWG. (1969) The Reproduction of Colour in Photography, Printing and Television. London: Fountain Press.

THOMSON, CL. (1948) Colour Transparencies. London: Focal Press.

Contributions, amendments and comments are welcome on this subject.

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