Les couleurs en photographie: causerie

In an unusual historical coincidence, the French inventors Louis Ducos du Hauron and Charles Cros each announced a solution to the longstanding problem of color photography on the very same day, May 7, 1869, at a meeting of the Société française de photographie. Unbeknownst to each other, they had both devised a subtractive, three-color process very similar to the basis of most modern color photography. Ducos and Cros both published treatises on their methods, which involved using color separation negatives to create a composite color print. Unfortunately, the process did not prove commercially successful in the nineteenth century, despite the fact that famed photographic publisher, Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Evrard, hoped to exploit Ducos’s process. Blanquart-Evrard presented the color method to the Société des Sciences in Lille in 1871, and published an example in its journal, but died the following year without ever establishing a color printing establishment.