You'll be surprised to learn how old color photography is...

First Color Photo

The very first color process to be used was conceived by James Clerk Maxwell, and used by Thomas Sutton to take the first color photo - of a ribbon.  That was in 1861!  The process used 3 black & white images taken through red, green and blue filters.  The 3 images were then projected on top of each other through the same 3 colors.  So that's not really what we think of today as a color photo.


There were several other early methods, but the first that was really successful was the Autochrome, from 1903.  They're also very beautiful, when you see ones that aren't too deteriorated.  Autochrome was invented by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière and sold from 1907, through several variations, until 1955.  The medium consisted of a glass plate coated on one side with a random mosaic of microscopic grains of potato starch, approximately 4,000,000 grains per square inch, dyed red-orange, green and blue-violet.  The images (if you see them at a good resolution) have a very fine, but still visible, grain that gives them a pointillist look, and a very particular color palette.

Christmas Day 1913

Autochromes are extraordinarily beautiful.  They have a subdued coloring that gives a soothing feeling.  The most interesting thing is to see an era in color that we're only used to thinking of in black and white. There are some good sites to see these images, a few are listed below, but you can also just do a Google image search.

Two Women Pick Roses in a Garden

If you want to see more, check out these books on autochromes at Amazon.  (FYI - Amazon may try to correct it to "Auto chrome" and give you very different results!)

National Geographic has hundreds of high-quality autochromes reproduced on its stock photo website.

Also worth checking out is this great collection of autochromes from the 'Archives of the Planet,' a collection that includes thousands of autochromes, that was put together by French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn between 1909 and 1931.  For example, go to their collection of over 4,000 autochrome portraits, or scroll through them here:







If you want to mimic an autochrome style in your digital photos, there are tutorials out there, like this Photoshop autochrome tutorial at photoshopsupport.com.  Please check it out!

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