The first color photo

The strategy for producing full-color projected images was outlined by influential Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in a paper to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1855, published in detail in the Society's Transactions in 1857.

In 1860, Maxwell accepted a professorship at King’s College London, where he continued his experiments into perception and vision.

He produced the earliest color photograph, an image of a tartan ribbon by superimposing onto a single screen three black-and-white images each passed through three filters—red, green, and blue.

Maxwell’s three-color method was intended to mimic the way the eye processes color, based on theories he had elaborated in an 1855 paper. By doing that, one could project three separate images simultaneously onto a screen and end up with an image featuring the entire color spectrum.

Because of this photograph Maxwell is credited as the founder of the theory of additive color. On May 17, 1861, Maxwell presented the very first color photograph at the Royal Institution. The photograph showed a tartan ribbon and was made by Thomas Sutton according to the three-color method proposed by Maxwell already in 1855.

His photo of a multicolored ribbon is the first to prove the efficacy of the three-color method, until then just a theory, and sets the stage for further color innovation, particularly by the Lumière brothers in France.
The first color photo