 Hello, welcome to this lecture of the History of Color Photography. We only touch on a few things, we're not getting totally deep dive as this is not necessarily an art history course, but a lot of these topics will be sort of the basis of where we are today and influence where we're going to go throughout the semester. So we're going to kind of start off with talking a little bit about the science of color. So we're going to start off with Sir Isaac Newton, known for his nominal bringings of physics to what we know today. Well, yes, he did have a lot of physics, but he was really interested in optics and how we see things. So he was interested in understanding the rainbow and light and how we see light. So he was at home during a plague and he was interested in just filling around as one physicist does with a light like a glass prism that he had. A prism is at the ends, there are triangles and it kind of extends out. And he was playing around in the dark room trying to see from the visible light spectrum where color comes from because there was a lot of background of how do we get colors, you know, where do colors come from? So he's playing around this prism in the dark room and he angles his prism just correctly and he gets the component colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. You may know it as Roy G. Viv, a good way to memorize the traditional rainbow of sort of the colors in the visible light spectrum. And the visible spectrum of light is sort of this narrow band of electromagnetic energy and that narrow band is what we can see with the human eye. I know animals can see different colors and light patterns, of course, but this is what we in this band of visible light is what we can see color from. So he's using like prisms and mirrors and he's looking into the colors and the spectrum and he is able to angle his prism out so that you can get like isolate the colors. So he kind of figured out, OK, if you combine blue and green light together, you can get cyan and if you combine green and red light together, it can get yellow, etc., etc. So he's like isolating the colors out and really kind of figure out how colors mix and how colors isolate. So this is an example of his color wheel. As you can see, this may look very different than a color wheel of going through elementary school where, you know, the opposite of red was green and yellow was blue and orange was purple. This is a little bit of a different color spectrum for the visible color, you know, different color wheel. We're updating it for the art way. And this is an example of how he kind of bent the color bands together to kind of create these other colors. So if he bent the green band plus the blue band, he got cyan, etc., etc. Another important thing to think about when we get into color photography is actually how we see color. So we have these bands of visible light and they're coming in to the world around us. And what we're seeing is actually what's reflected off of an object and we're only seeing what is reflected off. So in this image, you know, we see the white light coming in and the red is being reflected back to our eyes to show us a red ladybug for a red surface. So the other colors, the orange, yellow, green, etc., are being absorbed into that object. The only thing that is reflecting is the ladybug. And again, how we see color is a lot more deep than that. There's some videos for recommended viewing and required viewing that might be of help to understand how we see colors. If you are colorblind or have visual impairment, your visuals of colors may be very different. Now we talked about the color wheel and we think about how colors mix. We're working on two main portions, additive and subtractive color. So additive color is for red, green, and blue, RGB. You may have noticed this working in other departments like Illustrator, Photoshop, etc., where these are sort of your primary colors for this color spectrum. So when you combine the colors, all together it would equal white. And then where they intersect would be the secondary colors of yellow, cyan, and magenta. Now these are sort of direct viewing colors. So if you're looking at a computer screen which has RGB nodes into it, and some actually have cyan nodes, which is another story about how the digital screens are produced. But when you're looking at these screens, you're seeing direct color. Think of it if you are traditionally painting or drawing, you're adding the pigments together to create these colors. And then we have the subtractive color, which is actually what we work a lot with in print. So this is sort of the opposite. So your primary colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow, where they intersect would be RGB, and all those colors together would create black. And then the absence of color is white. This is mostly done with sort of filters or dye. So if you're physically printing a photograph, this is how it would go. And the varying proportions of the color kind of layer up to create different tones. This would be indirect light, so it's reflected. So anything that's sort of printed as a photograph or painted, that would be indirect. And you would see this as CMYK. K stands for key, which is black, because you want to get a true black when you're printing. And adding it together, you can get a deeper black than what's presented with all of them added together. So if we're looking at photographs and colors with it, we can talk about toning photographs. So traditional black and white medium photographs or alternative process to create the idea of color or tones. This isn't a true color photograph. So tone photographs, most popular are the cyanotypes, which you may have heard of as sun prints. These photographs are work on direct printing. So if you're in the dark room, you're doing a contact print to get your contact sheet or even the photograms, this process is for the cyanotype. So it's really simple. So you get the chemicals together to get this true blue color, and you can actually tone them different colors. You can also buy material to have different tones. So I have a material that I bought over at Hobby Lobby or Michaels that would give me a cyanotype but in a magenta hue. So it's very fun. But you have these iron salts, potassium, ammonium citrate, it can be a little caustic if you're not doing this appropriately. And you kind of paint it on your surface, whether it is watercolor paper, fabric or any sort of medium like that. That isn't too porous. I wouldn't recommend this on wood without doing like a primer or something on it. But anyway, so you paint it on your surface, let it dry, and you do this in a darkened room. It doesn't have to be pitch black like a dark room, just a room that doesn't have any sunlight low light in. So you paint your surface and then you take it to UV light. So whether that is a UV light table created specifically for this type of process or just a sun, a nice bright sunny day, which we have a lot of in Arizona, then it has to be exposed for a certain number of time. You'll do some test prints to figure it out, to figure out exactly what is a good ratio of time. And then you would just rinse off the unused iron salts and you can create your image, which is very blue. What's really cool about this is that it doesn't take a lot of work to do. It's great for artists who are kind of proofing negatives out in the field to get an idea or even documenting nature. And here we have sort of it how it would look like off of like a negative. So we get sort of this really nice detail in a blue tone, which is something that's a little different than the black and white we've seen. It gives a different view, but it's still sort of a monochromatic idea of an image. So then we have hand colored photography. So daguerreotypes were really popular. It was sort of the most accessible means of photography out there. You would create these daguerreotypes and they weren't super expensive. So it really brought photography into the hands of everybody. Now people had these daguerreotypes and they want to kind of push it to the next level and how can they kind of make these images pop. Now traditional wet plate, Chlodian or daguerreotype have insane detail. They're gorgeous. They're beautiful. But they weren't true to life because we weren't living in a black and white world. So what they would do is they would take a mixture of pigments and use gum arabic and kind of heaten it up a little bit to make it more pliable and to hand color the sanotypes. So they would paint on the surface and try to give some sort of depth to it. They're sensitive to light moisture and abrasion. So a lot of these hand painted daguerreotypes are not saved that well. It also was kind of like a status symbol. Like look, I've got this fully painted daguerreotype in my house. I'm very bougie. I'm very fancy. But you know, everyone's trying to show off at their high end photography here in the late 18th century, early 19th century. They did create a way to kind of make color through electrolysis. So you would like put the plates in different parts of solution and they would produce different colors to sort of automate the process as the hand process could be labor intensive. Now, we're not just looking at history photography in the West. There was a real rise in Japanese hand colored photography. So as travel became a lot more popular in Japan, people wanted to take souvenirs with them. And these photographs were a great souvenir. Now, people who are traveling from the West, they didn't want a then contemporary version of Japan that is evolving similar to what they are in their same sort of industrial revolution. So they wanted to look at sort of this traditional look and tell you one of this was what Japan looked like in these these photographs. It's a little problematic. But they wanted this sort of like romanticized version of Japan. What really made these a little different is that they weren't using daguerreotypes, but they were using album albumans, which are traditional, different alternative process for photography. And then they were using like watercolor paints to paint on them. The watercolor paints weren't, you know, they did fade easily. But the color I think the detail and like the delicacy of the watercolor really shows through on these prints. Now, we have these sort of ideas of what we think color photography could be. And then we started making actual color photographic images. So this is considered the first color photograph. So James Clark or James Clark Maxwell. He was mostly just a physicist. He wasn't really interested in photography, but he was interested in the physics of light. So this is a tartan ribbon. Can't really see it well. But so he had someone photograph this picture into three different filters. So he has a red filter, take a picture of it, a green and a blue. And they also did a yellow, but he did not need the yellow filter. And he sandwiched those filters together to create this image. So if we see this sort of picture, we have the red filter, green and blue. And when they layer on top of each other, that creates the full color image. Now, the same idea kind of became different. People are so excited what they can do with these kind of filtered images and layered and created full photograph is that they created these three color cameras, the chromograph scopes. So they create the separate images and then you just sandwich them together. This wasn't a great process. It was heavy. You know, it didn't really work too well. It was clunky. You had all these negatives. There's just a lot of areas where this just wasn't as successful as earlier photographic endeavors. And then came the autocrome. So the autocrome was created by the Lumiere brothers. So if you're interested in the history of film, both moving image and still image, the Lumiere brothers were. Pioneers in moving film. I talk about them in my other class, but the autocrome. So you have these plates that are used with like potato skirt, potato starch and the color these little grains is as four million per square inch. That is huge. So think of the detail where usually print 300 pixels per inch. Four million per square inch is a depth of resolution. That is insane. So they create these plates with these dyed potato starch to get the colors and when the emulsion goes through, there's like a chemical reaction to the starch grains to create this full color image. Autochromes were really just sort of this. Exciting thing. You didn't need a special camera like this to create a full color photograph. You just need the specific plates. And then you can get a full color photograph. This was a great way to send to the masses of what you can do with color photography. So here we have a sort of a diagram of the autocrome structure. So you had the glass, the physical thing that the photograph needs to be on. A varnish to sort of adhere the colored screen together and then another varnish and then the emulsion, which is if you're familiar with film photography, sort of develops and gets your latent image on to your surface. And you have another example here. The colors aren't as vibrant as what we may see today with today's digital cameras. However, they're pretty vibrant for the time. They're very gorgeous. The detail is insane. So this let other people see color in different areas. So, oh, I didn't know what kind of dress that the princess was wearing because I only could read about it in the newspaper. But now I could see a photograph and get an idea of what was going on. And the autocrome really allowed people to kind of push the idea of photography a little differently because now they could see in color. Now, the autocrome wasn't sort of this huge thing where everybody was making color photographs because it still was more expensive than what we have today. But, you know, it allowed people who could afford the materials to really explore. So we're going to talk about color film. I'm a huge fan of film, color film. So we're going to kind of talk about how it's developed and kind of different parts of it. So you have Coda Color, which is the first negative film. So if you worked in a photography one or in a traditional dark room, you've most of you used negative film, which is a reversal of what you would normally see when you morally take a photograph. This was huge because it was film, so it was cheaper. Instead of the big glass plates, portable, you can put it in your camera. And early Coda Chromes is it was both you pay for the actual film and the processing, so you would take your photographs and you would mail your canisters back to Kodak and they would process it and send it back now. They're processing, you know, they kind of had this antitrust case because they were the only ones who could process it. It was kind of creating a monopoly on the market. But yeah, so Coda Color negative films work with the additive color process. They come in many different formats. Film typically you would see 35 millimeter. You may see medium format 120. And then there's different formats labeled here, but they're not really in use today. It was used, introduced in 1942 and technically discontinued in 1963. However, you can buy film that is listed as Coda Color, say at B&H or Freestyle. Then there's Coda Chrome. So this is the slide film. So it's the positive image. It uses subtractive color and a different sort of chemical process. The previous was C22. Coda Chrome is K14 and it came in a lot more different modes, formats, both in for motion picture in still images for like 16, 8 millimeter, et cetera. And a lot of really great work came from Coda Chrome. It was discontinued. Different forms of it were discontinued between 2002 and 2009. But it's mimicking of colors just has like a certain quality to it. And that's what a lot of people will say about color film is that color film has a different quality than digital. It's softer, it's sharper, it has this realism. Color film makes an image completely different than say a digital image. So there's always the big love for color film. Now typically we see film in sort of three different designations for the processing. This is how after you shoot the film, how do you get the images fixed onto the negatives so then you can use it for printing or scanning. So the three main processes that are used today is C41. So this is for color negative films. There's different emulsions that you need to use. So you have to think about the different chemicals and bleach baths to process the film. Then there's black and white film. This is what you would process in photo one here at Phoenix College. This is film that has no color so you're only having one layer of light sensitivity. So you don't have to be as stringent on say the temperature or the agitation of your chemicals. And then there's E6 which would be for slide film. So it's different types of processing, different baths of the chemicals. But these are the different types of film processing that you would see today. We're going to talk about my favorite thing and possibly the whole entire world is the color dark room. So you would get your color negatives and you would make your prints. And if you've taken photography one, you know how to make a print. Color dark room is a little different because not only are you getting to worry about your exposure and quality of your tones and the sharpness of your image, you are throwing all of that in plus the correct color. Now your film is typically rated for daylight or tungsten. And you may have to correct it based on the right light. Bringing us back to our white balance lecture. But you have to kind of correct it. So you would work in the dark room and you would have your paper and it would give you a range of colors. You would work with cyan, magenta, and yellow. And the box of paper would give you a approximation of where you set your dials at. Typically it was like 65, 70, zero because you only really need to adjust two colors to get everything just right. So I would set magenta at 65 and yellow at 70 and then my cyan at zero. And you would see the dials here on your enlarger. And then you would make a test print for your exposures and you always would look for your exposure first. And then you would look at your test print in natural light. Typically you would actually have daylight rated light bulbs or we were by lots of windows. You want natural light, you don't want anything that could affect your viewing of color. And you would use these color slides to see if you need to add a little bit more blue or red. Because the image down below with the umbrellas is a little red or magenta. So I would have to go back to my traditional color wheel of CMYK. The opposite of blue would be yellow, magenta, green, cyan, red. So if my image was red, I would grab my green filter and kind of look at it through these sort of windows and I would kind of quickly move and inspect and say okay maybe I need to add a little bit of green and at the bottom of the cards they would say you need to add this much magenta and this much cyan to create that color. And then you would make your color changes and still kind of look at it. Additionally in the color dark room it's not yet to have pitch black. So in a black and white dark room you're going to have the red safe lights. But in a color dark room everything has to be pitch black. There's like the tiniest safe light. And typically all your chemicals also have to be at precise timing and temperatures. So you can do a tray method for color dark room. But larger color dark rooms they would have this huge machine called a processor. And in the dark room you would expose your paper, walk to the processor, kind of slide it in, kind of like convey your belt. And it would wait about I think like seven minutes and then your paper would come at the end dry ready to go. Fixed, you don't have to do anything to it. And you can look at your prints and sort of evaluate from there. And that's mostly like a community dark room atmosphere. So understanding the color dark room processes actually help you understand how to color correct in digital. It is a shame that color dark room is disappearing all over. It is possibly one of my favorite things to do. Lastly, we're going to talk just briefly about digital color. So we work most all digital cameras, very few don't use the Bayer filter, which color comes into the filter, which goes into the image sensor, which creates these patterns to create color on your digital image. And it would create color in RGB to create your colors. Sometimes again, you would see RGB E, E would be cyan. I don't know why E equals cyan, but it does to create the full colors. So this is all just a little bit to kind of help you think about the history of color as we work in color photography this semester. I would encourage you to go through the recommended readings and viewings to get kind of a better idea of the history of color photography, whether you're interested in the digital aspect, the physics, or even the analog aspect. There are some record required viewing slash readings to get you started. If you have any questions, feel email, feel free to email me or if you just want to talk about color film, or if you want to try color film photography with your film camera, I can definitely kind of help you navigate where to start.