Abstract
A program is developed for determining the history of star-forming galaxies based on the use of two- or multicolor photometry of the resolved stars in a given galaxy. We create a library of synthetic color-magnitude diagrams from theoretical stellar isochrones, taking the initial mass function, distance to the galaxy, internal and external absorption, and photometric errors into account. The resulting synthetic diagrams are combined linearly and compared quantitatively with photometric data for stars in a galaxy in order to determine star formation rates as a function of age and metallicity. This program is tested in detail under different conditions using artificial color-magnitude diagrams. Special attention is given to the limiting case when only the brightest stars of a galaxy can be seen in the color-magnitude diagram and the number of resolved stars is at most a few hundred. This limiting case corresponds to a large fraction of the nearby galaxies at distances of 3-5 Mpc observed by large ground based telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope.
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