THE PROBLEM OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN COLOR. 533 



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 inde- 

 pendent 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-litho- 

 graphic process ; and when these three positive impressions are super- 

 imposed on the same sheet of paper, a more or less successful repro- 

 duction 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 con- 

 siderable 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 re- 

 quire 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 photog- 

 rapher, 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 in- 

 superable 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 * would probably succeed very well, such as colored de- 

 signs 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 Ilauron, and improved by Albert, of Munich, 

 and Bierstadt, of New York. 



