The birth of modern day colour photography began with a lecture in 1861 by a Scottish physicist Sir James Clerk-Maxwell. He demonstrated that the shade of a colour could be made by mixing lights of the three primary colours (green, red, blue) in varying proportions. This was demonstrated by passing light through combined coloured glass plates, and then projecting the results onto a screen. This was the first recorded additive system applied to colour photography. Thus he was able to interpret the earlier Young Helmholtz colour vision theory. The subtractive system was later described by a French pianist, Louis Ducos Hauron. In his book Les Couleurs en Photographie; Solution du probleme of 1869. Du hauron laid down all the basic principals of modern colour photography, both subtractive and additive. The subtractive method was based on the principal theory that pigments absorb or subtract from light all colours except their own which they reflect.

The dream and realisation of producing photographs in colour remained theorectical for many years. It wasn't until 1873 when Hermann Vogel, Professor of Photochemistry at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin, discovered that the collodion (Collodion process known as "wet collodion" This was a great improvement on the earlier calotype process because of its increase in the speed gained by exposing the plate whilst still wet) plate which was non-sensitive to colours other than blue, could be made more sensitive to green by treating it with certain aniline dyes. This led to the orthochromatic plate, an emulsion found to be sensitive to blue, and green light but still over sensitive to red. In 1906 Wratten and Wainwright in London introduced the panchromatic plate (an emulsion sensitive to all colours of the visible spectrum and to a certain amount of ultraviolet light).

A break through occured in 1891 with the invention of a colour camera by Frederic Ives of Philadelphia. The photochromoscope was a technical aid designed to view his photographs in colour. Three seperate negatives were taken in the camera, one for each primary colour. These would then be combined on to one plate, which in turn was used to make three separations. As time progressed and further experiments were carried out. None had any practical application until the developments in 1904 made by Auguste and Louis Lumiere, who patented the colour screen process.

Rudolf Fischer made a practical contribution when he invented dye-coupling in 1912. Dye-coupling is when there is three layers of emulsion, each with a different colour sensitivity, are held on one support. Chemicals used in colour film emulsion or in the process developers that couple with exposed silver halides to release dyes that form the colour image. The chemicals used in film today to form subtractive dyes are commonly phenol for cyan dye development, pyrazolones for magenta, and acetoacetanilides for yellow. The couplers are complex structures, they are designed to form a molecular "ball and chain" to prevent them from wandering through the tripack layers. However; the first practical film did not appear for another twenty three years, until Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky produced the "Kodachrome film at the Eastman Kodak Research Laboratories.