Lippmann Photography

absolute color… illusive illusion. Can we fix the light right without using a brain. Any one color can be produced using any of several color points. Change one anchor choice, you get a different range of possible colors.

The other way was Lippmann. interferential photography or interference colour photography, as well as Lippmann photography.

The method is very simple. A plate is covered with a sensitive transparent layer that is even and grainless. This is placed in a holder containing mercury. During the take, the mercury touches the sensitive layer and forms a mirror. After exposure, the plate is developed by ordinary processes. After drying the colours appear, visible by reflection and now fixed.

This result is due to a phenomenon of interference which occurs within the sensitive layer. During exposure, interference takes place between the incident rays and those reflected by the mirror, with the formation of interference fringes half a wavelength distant from each other. The fringes imprint photographically through the whole thickness of the film and form a casting for the light rays. When the shot is afterwards subjected to white light, colour appears because of selective reflection. The plate at each point only sends back to the eye the simple colour imprinted. The other colours are destroyed by interference. The eye thus perceives at each point the constituent colour of the image. This is no more than a phenomenon of selective reflection as in the case of the soap bubble or mother-of-pearl. The print in itself is formed of colourless matter like that of mother-of-pearl or soap film.[lippmann lecture, 1908]

link to: color from nothing

Making Grey

Principles of color photography.

neutrals

Selective and nonselective neutrals– a foundation concept in the technology of color photography. The illustration that we have many paths to grey, none of them is the perfect path. For any decision about a colorant (dye or pigment) we must consider more than making a neutral, even a set of dyes making a neutral results in different color volume. This is the why a film looks different: the relationships among the real color and the created color. Industry chooses the colors that they can sell. Old texts, as well as the experiments, remain useful, valid today. They form the foundation. Those equations are accurate — math has a way of doing that.

The means to the solution. The tools of presenting or testing, examining the experiments have changed drastically since the foundation years. We can readily present to others results they couldn’t imagine. That has changed the learning, not the theory.

we can easily compare gamuts using at hand Apple tools. this color cube is what a set of balanced Kodak dyes from dye transfer (1985) covers compared to the background cube of an HP Z printer on glossy baryta paper from 2015.

Clearly, implementation of the theory has advanced.

dye transfer color inset into HP inkjet

Key names: Evans, Friedman, Spencer, Wall.

  • R. Burnham, “Visual Selection of Color Film Neutrals,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. 48, 215-224 (1958).
  • W. Brewer, W. Hanson, and C. Horton, “Subtractive Color Reproduction. The Approximate Reproduction of Selected Colors*,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. 39, 924-927 (1949).
  • Wall, History of Three-Color Photography
  • Friedman, History of color photography,
  • Spencer, Colour photography in practice
  • Evans, Principles of Color Photography