The first colour photograph, 1861 Thomas Sutton collaborated with the theoretical physicist James Clerk Maxwell to take three separate exposures of a tartan ribbon through red, green and blue filters. The First Color Portrait of Leo Tolstoy, and Other Amazing Color Photos of Czarist Russia (1908) Venice in Beautiful Color Images 125 Years Ago: The Rialto Bridge, St. Mark’s Basilica, Doge’s Palace & More. Today, the three physical plates that together made up the world’s first color photograph reside in Maxwell’s former home in Edinburgh (now a museum).
Hand-Colored 1860s Photographs Reveal the Last Days of Samurai Japan. The world’s first photograph made in a camera was taken in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. It was a picture of a tartan ribbon, which he photographed three times with red, yellow, and blue filters, and then complied it into the final composite. But in the early days of photography, dating back to the oldest surviving photograph taken by Joseph Nicephore Niépce in 1826, images depicted the world in black and white. And it wasn’t until 1906 that glass plates sensitive to the entire visible spectrum were available. Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. The photograph was taken from the upstair’s windows of Niépce’s estate in the Burgundy region of France. The first color photograph in the world was taken by a Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, in 1861. It wasn't until 1861 that Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell and photographer Thomas Sutton were able to produce the world's first color photograph.