Colour and Black &White Photography

Black-and-white

See also: Monochrome photography

A black-and-white image showing a (monochrome) photograph being developed.

All photography was originally monochrome, or black-and-white. Even after color film was readily available, black-and-white photography continued to dominate for decades, due to its lower cost and its "classic" photographic look. It is important to note that some monochromatic pictures are not always pure blacks and whites, but also contain other hues depending on the process. The cyanotype process produces an image of blue and white for example. The albumen process, first used more than 150 years ago, produces brown tones.

Many photographers continue to produce some monochrome images, often because of the established archival permanence of well processed silver halide based materials.

Some full color digital images are processed using a variety of techniques to create black and whites, and some manufacturers produce digital cameras that exclusively shoot monochrome.

Color

Main article: Color photography

Color photography was explored beginning in the mid 1800s. Early experiments in color could not fix the photograph and prevent the color from fading. The first permanent color photo was taken in 1861 by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell.

Early color photograph taken by Prokudin-Gorskii (1915).

One of the early methods of taking color photos was to use three cameras. Each camera would have a color filter in front of the lens. This technique provides the photographer with the three basic channels required to recreate a color image in a darkroom or processing plant. Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii developed another technique, with three color plates taken in quick succession.

Practical application of the technique was held back by the very limited color response of early film; however, in the early 1900s, following the work of photo-chemists such as H. W. Vogel, emulsions with adequate sensitivity to green and red light at last became available.

The first commercially successful color process, the Autochrome, invented by the French Lumière brothers, reached the market in 1907. It was based on a 'screen-plate' filter made of dyed grains of potato starch, and was one of many additive color screen products available between the 1890s and the 1950s. The presumably final use of the additive screen process for color photography on film was Polachrome, an "instant" 35 mm slide film introduced in the mid-1980s and discontinued in the mid-2000s. In 1935, American Kodak introduced the first modern ('integrated tri-pack') color film which was developed by two musicians Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky ("Man" and "God") working with the Kodak Research Labs. It was Kodachrome, based on multiple layered silver gelatin emulsions that were each sensitized to one of the three additive colors—red, green, and blue. The cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes were created in those layers by adding color couplers during processing. This was followed in 1936 by Agfa's Agfacolor Neu. Unlike the Kodachrome tri-pack process, the color couplers in Agfacolor Neu were incorporated into the emulsion layers during manufacture, which greatly simplified the film processing. Most modern color films, except Kodachrome, use such incorporated-coupler techniques, though since the 1970s nearly all have used a technique developed by Kodak to accomplish this, rather than the original Agfa method. Instant color film was introduced by Polaroid in 1963.

Color photography may form images as a positive transparency, intended for use in a slide projector, or as color negatives intended for use in creating positive color enlargements on specially coated paper. The latter is now the most common form of film (non-digital) color photography owing to the introduction of automated photoprinting equipment.