When we undertake to make a photograph in color, in effect we ask one and the same chemical substance to reflect for us long, medium, or short waves, red, green, or blue light, according as it has been acted on by waves of greater or lesser length. The demand seems to me preposterous.
The hope for photography in color lies in a different and less independent direction. By the use of suitably colored plates of glass placed before the lens of the photographic camera, it is possible to obtain ordinary negatives of the red, yellow, and blue constituents of a brightly colored surface—a carpet, for example. These can be made to yield red, yellow, and blue positives by the aid of the photo-lithographic process; and when these three positive impressions are superimposed on the same sheet of paper, a more or less successful reproduction of the colored object is obtained. The selection of the three transparent pigments used in printing is necessarily left to the taste and judgment of the operator, or I should say artist, as without considerable artistic knowledge the results are not likely to be valuable. It will be seen, then, that in this process photography is really made to act as an aid to chromo-lithography, and the results are really chromo-lithographs, the work being mainly performed by the camera and colored glasses. I do not see why it should not be possible in this way to reproduce more or less successful colored pictures of brightly tinted objects.
When we come to landscape the problem is more difficult, for a large part of its color consists of delicately tinted grays, the handling of which would be, to say the least, very troublesome, and would require far more than the superposition of the three layers of pigment just mentioned. For progress in this direction it would be necessary that the experimenter should, at the same time, be a skillful photographer, a good chromo-lithographer, and a landscape-painter. The results obtained would not be exact representations of natural scenery, but rather sketches in which the artistic taste presided over, modified, and massed together natural tints. They would be none the worse for that. Of course, there would still remain the difficulties connected with an artistic disposition of light and shade, and the still more insuperable ones of composition; for the disposition of objects in a landscape is rarely just what we want, or even what we are willing to tolerate. On the other hand, there are many simpler objects where this process[1] would probably succeed very well, such as colored designs of all kinds of decorated objects, and all those cases where the coloring is simple and not too evanescent.—Photographic Bulletin.
- ↑ Due originally to C. Cross and Ducos du Hauron and improved by Albert, of Munich, and Bierstadt, of New York.
