<\/p>\n The French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumi\u00e8re took the idea of using red, green and blue dots to create a full-color photograph and started looking for the materials to create a transparent color filter. The material needed to have uniform, microscopic round particles, but it also needed to be relatively easy (and affordable) to find \u2013 and that\u2019s where the potato comes in.<\/p>\n Latest Videos FromDigital Camera World<\/p>\n Potato starch has microscopic round particles. The Lumi\u00e8re brothers found that adding dye to potato starch<\/a> in separate batches of red, green, and violet and then mixing the solution together and painting over a sticky glass plate created a color filter. Charcoal powder was used to fill in any gaps and help create contrast. Light went through the tri-colored dyed potato starch coating on one side of the glass to hit the light-sensitive chemicals on the other side of the glass plate.<\/p>\n \n If you look closely at a Autochrome Lumi\u00e8re, you can see that it’s actually made up of red, green, and blue dots (Image credit: Paul Castelnau \/ Galerie Bilderwelt \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n The result was a glass photograph like many of the glass-based images of the era \u2013 only these photographs were in color. Better yet, the Autochrome Lumi\u00e8re plates worked with existing cameras.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n The Autochrome overcame a number of hurdles that earlier color photography attempts did not, making a process that was easy enough and affordable enough to create a sellable photography process. But, the Autochrome wasn\u2019t without its challenges. The glass plates needed to be held up to light to view, with the best way to see the glass images through a diascope stand with a mirror. Autochromes also tend to fade when exposed to too much UV light, so these photographs weren\u2019t something that could just be hung on a wall.<\/p>\n \n (Image credit: Jules Gervais-Courtellemont\/Galerie Bilderwelt\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n Autochromes were known for having a rather startling dreamlike feel to them. In fact, one article from the Photographic News in 1908<\/a> described the process this way: \u201cWitchcraft would have been but a feeble, almost complimentary term, for anything so realistic and startling.\u201d<\/p>\n While the autochrome is considered the first commercially successful form of color photography, the plates were more expensive than monochrome ones and required a much longer exposure time \u2013 even a sunny day would have still required a one-second exposure, longer on a cloudy day.<\/p>\n \n A color still life from around 1908 (Image credit: Franz Kaiser\/Archiv Setzer-Tschiedel\/Imagno\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n Multi-layer color films eventually replaced the fragile glass plates. But the autochrome also helped prove a concept that is still in use today: that dots of red, green, and blue can create a full color image.<\/p>\n Digital camera sensors use a similar idea. A colored filter array<\/a> arranged with tiny green, red, and blue filters is what allows a camera sensor to see colors \u2013 without this arrangement of red, green, and blue, the camera sensor would be black-and-white<\/a>.<\/p>\n You may also like<\/p>\n Read more about camera history<\/a>, or browse the best retro cameras<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Color photography got its start from an unusually bland source: Potatoes. The first attempts at color photography date…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":723521,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-723520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=723520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/723521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=723520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=723520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=723520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Lunch](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/rw7W96hXXcVTPRd6c6VbwE.jpg\")
\n<\/p>\n![\"Captain](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cFF7Eeti8FsnQ9ac9ByXib.jpg\")
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