Color Photography (1861)

 Color Photography(1861)

 *Maxwell develops the trichromatic process for producing color images.

*Maxwell's composite image of three photographs shows tartan ribbon through filters of different colors.

British mathematician and physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) was a giant of nineteenth- century science. Best known for his Maxwell equations, which were the best insight into electromagnetism of their day, his interests also included Saturn's rings and the human perception of color. It was this latter interest that led to the first color photograph in 1861.

In the manner of a true showman, Maxwell revealed his photograph of a tartan ribbon at the Royal Institution in London. His studies of human vision, including the condition of color blindness, had led him to conclude that color images were possible using a "trichromatic process." He had arranged for his tartan ribbon to be shot by professional photographer Thomas Sutton, the inventor of the single-lens reflex camera. The images were black and white, but, critically, Maxwell had three such images taken through red, green, and blue filters, respectively. Having turned the images into slides, he then projected them through the same filters in such a way that they were carefully superimposed on each other on the screen. The effect was a recognizable reproduction of the tartan in glorious color.

Maxwell was lucky. His demonstration should not really have worked at all because, unknown to him, his photographic emulsion was not sensitive to red light Fortunately, the red in the tartan did reflect ultraviolet light, and this was picked up by the emulsion.

The trichromatic process became the foundation for all color photography, and Maxwell's three original slides of the tartan ribbon are now on display in a small museum in Edinburgh.

In 1886, physicist and inventor Gabriel Lippmann used his knowledge of physics to create what we can consider the first color photograph without the aid of any pigments or dyes. Lippmann tapped into a phenomenon known as interference, which has to do with the propagation of waves.

By 1906, Lippmann had presented his process along with color images of a parrot, a bowl of oranges, a group of flags, and a stained glass window. The discovery won him the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Over two decades before Lippman was developing his interference technique for color photos, Maxwell was hard at work and ready to define a new color theory that dictates the foundation of how we reproduce colors to this very day. Maxwell proposed the idea of taking photographs of a scene through red, green, and blue filters. Once the images were played back on projectors with matching filters, they would overlap to create a complete color image. Maxwell presented how the principle could then be applied to photography in 1861 during a lecture at the Royal Institution with his famous photograph of a tricolor ribbon.

Maxwell’s photo was the first durable color photographic image.