[ceebee23]

There were many attempts at colour photography prior to the introduction of modern colour film by Agfa in 1936 and Kodak the following year.

Additive processes of various types were available until then including the best known "Autochrome" where a panchromatic plate was coated with fine grains of rice starch dyed in red green and blue. The plates were reversal processed into slides giving a full colour image. These systems all suffered from slow speeds and grainy images lacking saturation.

Only the one shot type systems used by Gorkii (the Russian photographer) were capable of proper colour rendition. but also suffered from slow film speeds due to the need for the rgb colour filters.

Moving films in colour were also experimented with, many including Kodak and Technicolor used two colour systems with the front and back of the film stock coated in red/green sensitve layers. But two colour systems could not provide a full spectrum of colour. (Hence the development of three strip Technicolor in the 30s.)

Various "field sequential" type systems were also developed with spinning filters in front of the camera but they too proved difficult as the frame rate was a problem.

Maxwell's additive experiments in the 1860 and 1870s led to many attempts at RGB colour systems. At the same time a French experimenter, whose name escapes me, succeeded in developing a subtractive system but his experiments went unnoticed for decades.