A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N DArthur-Louis Ducos Du Hauron : 1837 - 1920
Ducos Du Hauron (b. Langon, France,1837; d. October 1920), French scientist and interested in photography from 1859, made a major contribution to the development of colour photography. In his book, Les Couleurs en Photographie (Colour in Photography), 1869, he proposed the subtractive methods of colour photography. Unfortunately, his theories could not be put to the test at the time, because of the lack of suitable materials. However, it is this principle which is used in present-day colour photography. In 1878 he published Photographie en Couleur (Photography in Colour), describing practical methods which he patented and in 1891, proposed and patented the anaglyph method of stereoscopic photography. In 1900 Du Hauron was awarded the Progress Medal of the Royal Photographic Society for his work in colour photography. Anaglyphs The conventional method of viewing stereoscopic photographs in the last century was to use a viewer which held a pair of images, and which enabled each eye to see only one; by fusing these together a three dimensional effect was recreated. In 1891 Louis Ducos Du Hauron invented a different method. This consisted of printing the two negatives which form a stereoscopic photograph on to the same paper, one in blue (or green), one in red. The viewer would then use coloured glasses with red (for the left eye) and blue or green (right eye). The left eye would see the blue image which would appear black, whilst it would not see the red; similarly the right eye would see the red image, this registering as black. Thus a three dimensional image would result.
Anaglyphs Ducos Du Hauron, a French scientist patented the anaglyph method of stereoscopic photography in 1891. Anaglyphs, like other technologies, use a pair of images taken from slightly different vantage points. These two images are then color corrected and superimposed slightly out of register so one image is offset slightly from the other. When viewed through a pair of glasses with different colored lenses, the image appears in 3D. The glasses are usually red and blue, but they can also be other combinations depending on how the image was coded and the color of the glasses used to view them. Normally the red lens covers the left eye and the blue or green lens the right eye, but this can vary.
The first color printing process was Ducos Du Hauron's carbon process of 1868. Strictly a lab curiosity at the time, results were not entirely convincing, in part because of the lack of true red-part-of-the-spectrum sensitizers, until Vogel's work much later. Du Hauron's yellow-magenta-cyan (actually more like yellow-red and blue back then) were developed and assembled on mica sheets and bound together.
Ducos Du Hauron, (b. 1837, Langon, France--d. October 1920, Agen), French physicist and inventor who in 1869 developed the so-called trichrome process of colour photography, a key 19th-century contribution to photography. The son of a tax collector, he began experimenting in his 20s and on March 1, 1864, patented (but did not build) a device for taking and projecting motion pictures. Four years later, on Nov. 23, 1868, he was granted a patent on a process for making colour photographs. He photographed each scene through green, orange, and violet filters, then printed his three negatives on thin sheets of bichromated gelatin containing carbon pigments of red, blue, and yellow, the complementary colours of the negatives. When the three positives, usually in the form of transparencies, were superimposed, a full-colour photograph resulted. Another French experimenter, Charles Cros, discovered the process independently, publishing his findings just 48 hours after Ducos Du Hauron received his patent. Ducos Du Hauron described his results in Les Couleurs en photographie: Solution du problème (1869; "Colours in Photography: Solution of the Problem") and Les Couleurs en photographie et en particulier l'héliochromie au charbon (1870; "Colours in Photography: Colour Reproduction with Carbon Pigments"). Continuing his research, Du Hauron devised improvements and cost reductions for printed colour reproductions. In 1891 he patented a device for three-dimensional photography called an anaglyph. Though he realized little profit from his inventions, he did receive a pension from the government and in 1912 was made a chevalier of the French Legion of Honour.
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