page_title: Frederic Eugene Ives
section_title: Color photography
hierarchical_section_title: Frederic Eugene Ives / Color photography
caption_attribution_description: English: Frederic Eugene Ives (1856-1937) inserting a Kromogram into his Kromskop, circa 1899. The Ives Kromskop (pronounced "chrome-scope" and known generically as a chromoscope or photochromoscope) was a device used to view Kromograms, specially mounted sets of three black-and-white photographs taken through red, green and blue filters. It used corresponding colored glass filters to appropriately illuminate each photograph and transparent reflectors to visually combine them into a single full-color image. A monoscopic (2-D) "Junior Kromskop" is shown. The more common stereoscopic (3-D) model was standard.
context_page_description: Frederic Eugene Ives was a U.S. inventor, born at Litchfield, Connecticut. In 1874–78 he had charge of the photographic laboratory at Cornell University. He moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where in 1885 he was one of the founding members of the Photographic Society of Philadelphia. He was awarded the Franklin Institute's Elliott Cresson Medal in 1893, the Edward Longstreth Medal in 1903, and the John Scott Medal in 1887, 1890, 1904 and 1906. His son Herbert E. Ives was a pioneer of television and telephotography, including color facsimile.
context_section_description: Ives was a pioneer in the field of color photography. He first demonstrated a system of natural color photography at the 1885 Novelties Exposition of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. His fully developed Kromskop (long-vowel marks over both "o"s and pronounced "chrome-scope") color photography system was commercially available in England by late 1897 and in the US about a year later.
  Three separate black-and-white photographs of the subject were taken through carefully adjusted red, green and blue filters, a method of photographically recording color first suggested by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855 and imperfectly demonstrated in 1861, but subsequently forgotten and independently reinvented by others.
  Transparent positives of the three images were viewed in Ives' Kromskop (a device known generically as a chromoscope or photochromoscope), which used red, green and blue filters and transparent reflectors to visually combine them into one full-color image. Both monocular and stereoscopic Kromskop viewers were made. Prepared sets of images, called Kromograms, were sold for viewing in them. Alternatively, a Kromskop "triple lantern" projector could be used to illuminate each image with light of the correct color and exactly superimpose them on a projection screen.
  Special cameras and camera attachments were sold to prospective "Kromskopists" who wanted to create their own Kromograms.
  The quality of the color was highly praised but the system was not a commercial success. It was discontinued shortly after the 1907 introduction of the Autochrome process, which was simple to use and required no special equipment.
  In 2009, several Kromogram views of San Francisco made by Ives six months after the 1906 earthquake and fire were discovered while cataloging a collection of Kromograms at the National Museum of American History. They are believed to be the only existing images showing the aftermath of that disaster in natural color (i.e., with color recorded and reproduced photographically rather than added in by hand), as well as the earliest extant natural color photographs of San Francisco.
caption: Ives inserting a Kromogram into a Junior Kromskop, circa 1899
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