Progress in Color: Surmounting Obstacles

Pre Color Photography-Daguerreotypes
Immediately after the introduction of the first daguerrotype in 1839, work was being done in color reproduction to add to the light and shadow captured by Daguerre’s process. Numerous methods existed for coloring daguerrotypes. In fact, a
significant number of surviving daguerrotypes show evidence of coloring. By the turn of the century, most photographer’s studios offered coloring as a process and wedding photos and portraits were commonly colored using sophisticated paints and dyes that artists could use to render an image in color. This process involved engaging an artist to assist in colorizing the image, greatly increasing the cost and time required and limiting the subjects to which the process could be applied. In order for a photograph to be colorized, there needed to be a willing suitor to engage an artist in the process. This proved to be more practical for formal photographs such as portraits than for photographs that documented events or happenings. A wedding portrait would be colorized by the family of the bride, whereas a photo of a Civil War battlefield or mountain stream could find few willing partners to outlay the expense of engaging in such a practice. delineations of what would be portrayed in color based on cost and technical abilities began to emerge.

Early true color processes
The first patent obtained for a photographic process that could capture images in full color was registered in England in 1876 by Louis Ducos Du Hauron. The patent application focused on additive color processes, whereby photographic images were separated into red, blue, and green images and then recomposed into one image. Du Hauron used natural pigments and extensive experimentation to reproduce color imagery and even foreshadowed in patent applications sophisticated subtractive processes which supplanted additive processes nearly half a century later. His work was hampered by the general limitations of photography at the time, which required 15 second exposures for black and white images. His process tripled that time by requiring the collection of three separate images, restricting the use of color photography to still lifes and the occasional portrait of someone who could sit very still. The color images produced by these early processes were so unstable as to lose images rapidly as they were exposed to light. This instability, combined with their great expense, limited their popularity in the short run and their longevity as items of study today. Work done by Frederick Ives in the 1890's began to increase the portability of color cameras, using dry plates and hand cameras.

 

Autochrome
The most famous and enduring of the early color processes to emerge was the Lumiere brothers Autochrome process. Autochrome plates were initially introduced at the Paris Exhibition of 1904 and were launched commercially in the summer of 1907. This process produced beautiful color images that gained immense popularity in Europe. It is estimated that over 20 million autochrome plates were exposed from 1907 through the early 1930’s and the market exploded for diascopes, the devices needed to view the plates. High demand for the materials and an inability to keep up with demand for autochrome photographers and developers limited the spread of the process much beyond France and England.

The autochrome process was no panacea for those seeking true color exposures. The process required an exposure time of 1-2 seconds in well lit sun, which was a process still much slower than black and white photography. Autochromes required the delicate use of dyed starch grains to filter color and imprint an image onto a glass transparency that could not be projected, was very fragile, and suffered a high failure rate in the developing process due to clumping of the starch grains. The plates also suffered from a washed out appearance resulting from the fact that the dense plates only transmitted 7 ½ percent of the light hitting them. The additive method used in the autochrome process produced a single positive image that was difficult to convert to a print. Even more challenging was the attempt to convert to a printing plate. Autochrome positives did not provide adequate color separation in a negative to strike a printing plate without significant distortion of the images.

Advances through time
The search for an improved color process that could match the technical innovation seen in the world of black and white photography in the early 20th century spawned a host of processes and products. Reproduction of color proved to be a tough nut to crack, technically speaking, and processes introduced prior to the 1930’s ultimately failed. Several processes required the use of separate lenses to create separate negatives that were then combined to a single print, but color reproduction and stability were widely variable. The carbro process was one of the first film based processes to reproduce color. It still required the separate negatives(thus separate exposures) with the development process stripping a gelatin emulsion from each print, dyed cyan, magenta, and yellow and then transferred to photographic paper. This process was accurate, but complex. It continued to restrict subject matter due to the requirement of separation negatives and long exposures. The ability to take a photograph in color with one shot only became possible in 1927, with the advent of the color one shot camera. The early 1930’s saw the development of Agfacolor and DuFay color in Europe, which used film processes and got shutter speeds down to 1/25th of a second, still slow in comparison to black and white counterparts, but a clear step in a positive direction. Kodak introduced the Kodacolor process in 1928(not to be confused with a process of the same name introduced in the 1940’s) that sought marry color processes to film technology, but could not surmount technical difficulties in attempting to create lasting, lifelike color images. While it was possible to create color images prior to the mid 1930’s, the processes available each had flaws significant enough to make them costly and difficult, limiting their use to particular subjects photographed by those who could afford to pay.

Kodachrome: Real Color at Last
The earliest attempt at color by the company that would later dominate the field was the introduction of the Kodacolor process in 1928. The process had limited success but spurred a connection between Leopold Mannes, a pianist, and Leopold Godowsky, a violinist, who worked on the project at Eastman Kodak’s Rochester site beginning in 1930. Both were Harvard graduates. Neither were chemists, experienced photographers or photo processers. This made them an oddity at Eastman Kodak, the foremost photographic research facility in the world. The Leopolds stumbled through the early 1930's without much success in creating a new color process and feared cancellation of their project in response to economic realities of the depression. Their work focused on a subtractive process whereby a chemical emulsion bonded to film would create one image, with chemical color layers removed to create a color image. The duo achieved a breakthrough in late 1936 a color 35 mm film for still cameras was introduced. Film from Kodachrome processes was returned to a customer as an uncut roll of slide transparencies. The film would be viewed by hand or through one of a very few projectors available for viewing at the time. Processing was a very complex process that had to be done at Kodak labs and costs for film included processing. In 1938, improvements in Kodachrome made processing easier, reducing the number of steps to processing a negative from 28 to 18. Problems with overexposure of red tones that plagued the earliest version of the film image were eliminated in 1938. Other improvements in 1938 include advances in the permanence of dyes. Few Kodachrome images prior to 1938 survive due to issues with stability in dye process in early Kodachrome film. These improvements meant that by 1938, Kodak had created the first consistent, stable photographic film process for use in handheld cameras that could produce truly lifelike color with consistency and relative ease. In 1939, slide mounting services for Kodachrome film became available, enabling a much easier viewing process and further enhancing consistency.

Kodachrome’s Lasting Impact
The introduction and improvements to Kodachrome revolutionized the way color photography was employed and perceived by 1939. The process was radically different from other means available at the time and this sparked a great deal of interest from professional photographers, still skeptical of a color process unburdened by the technical and artistic limitations of its predecessors. It was the first color film that could be used for an “action” shot and became a fixture in high end magazines. In 1938, National Geographic utilized 62 Kodachrome exposures. In 1939 the magazine used over 300 Kodachrome images. Shortly thereafter the magazine switched exclusively to Kodachrome and stayed with the process as the predominant photographic process until the 1980’s.

Kodachrome opened new avenues for artistic expression. All color processes of the time had peculiarities particular to their application, Kodachrome was no different. Kodachrome film allowed for color subtelties that seemed to exist only in that film. The richness of Kodachrome blues could be used for their own sake artistically without regard to realism, similar to the way shadow and light could be manipulated in black and white reproduction. Kodachrome also opened the world of color photography up to amateur photographers and hobbyists. The reliance on Kodak for processing, a hindrance for professional photographers, leveled the playing field for amateurs, who could simply send off the negatives and get brilliant color photos in the mail. The technical skills, and costs to pursue this hobby still required a significant investment of time and money. Not until the 1958 introduction of the instamatic camera did photography move to a medium of expression for the masses and the more modern notion of photography as a means of capturing memories took hold.