E6 Dye Question

AKodakZen · May 2, 2023

So one of my local labs develops E6 and I just dropped off a roll there for the first time.

I noticed on their website it said something that I didn’t understand and can’t seem to find a clear answer in googling. They say:

“e6 film is processed standard WITHOUT a color dye applied after processing”

I’m sure it’s something simple I’m missing but what does that mean?

Thanks,
Z

DREW WILEY · May 2, 2023

Do THEY know what it means? Ask them. Perhaps that's a clumsy way to say chrome film doesn't have an apparent orange mask after processing like color neg film does, distinguishing the two options.

AKodakZen · May 2, 2023

DREW WILEY said:
Do THEY know what it means? Ask them. Perhaps that's a clumsy way to say chrome film doesn't have an apparent orange mask after processing like color neg film does, distinguishing the two options.

Yeah I should probably give them a call. The way they phrased it sounded like it was a known thing but maybe not finding any info on it should have been a tip off

cmacd123 · May 2, 2023

Way back when - Kodachrome had the dyes added at the time of processing. while E6 the dyes are FORMED in the colour development step.

and @DREW WILEY colour negative film comes from the factory with the Orange appearance baked in, although some of the orange changes in Processing as part of the formation of the image... the orange apperence is part of an eleabrate system to avoid errors from the imperfect absorpsion of the image dyes.

DREW WILEY · May 2, 2023

Well, nobody these days is going to have a sign on the wall implying Kodachrome services. And of course, the orange mask of color neg film is built-in. Most of us no doubt know that. I just loaded another 8X10 color neg into one of my 8x10 color enlargers for printing soon, and know darn well what it's like to deal with that orange mask. The query was not that fact, but what the website of that lab might have been implying; and I suggested a hypothetical answer. A true post-dying process would have been Technicolor, not Kodachrome. It would be wonderful to see both of those processes revived, as unrealistic as that is.

falotico · May 7, 2023

Most monopack color film has dye couplers incorporated into the emulsion of the unexposed film. When the film is developed the developer molecules are oxidized by the exposed silver-halide grains; the rest of the developer molecules are not oxidized. The oxidized developer molecules will "couple" with the dye couplers in the film and form the final dye molecules which form part of the color image. Kodachrome mixed the dye couplers into the developing fluid--not the emulsion--so that these dye couplers would not enter into the film until the film was developed. In this respect the dye color is applied after the film comes in for processing.

BUT in the 1920s, before Kodachrome was invented, there was a British company that tried to market a color snapshot process, named "Colour Snapshots Ltd". Unfortunately their process didn't work too well and the company would touch up the snapshots by painting the prints after they were developed. This caused obvious problems. For example during the '20s stop signs in Ireland were green but the Colour Snapshot company would paint them as red in the photos sent to the customers. Photographic prints with after-applied dyes got a bad reputation. I think your E6 lab wanted to assure customers that they didn't use this kind of inferior process.

koraks · May 8, 2023

falotico said:
I think your E6 lab wanted to assure customers that they didn't use this kind of inferior process.

Wouldn't it be a tad comical if a lab today tried to avoid the bad reputation of a process that no human presently alive has ever used?

AKodakZen · May 9, 2023

falotico said:
Most monopack color film has dye couplers incorporated into the emulsion of the unexposed film. When the film is developed the developer molecules are oxidized by the exposed silver-halide grains; the rest of the developer molecules are not oxidized. The oxidized developer molecules will "couple" with the dye couplers in the film and form the final dye molecules which form part of the color image. Kodachrome mixed the dye couplers into the developing fluid--not the emulsion--so that these dye couplers would not enter into the film until the film was developed. In this respect the dye color is applied after the film comes in for processing.

BUT in the 1920s, before Kodachrome was invented, there was a British company that tried to market a color snapshot process, named "Colour Snapshots Ltd". Unfortunately their process didn't work too well and the company would touch up the snapshots by painting the prints after they were developed. This caused obvious problems. For example during the '20s stop signs in Ireland were green but the Colour Snapshot company would paint them as red in the photos sent to the customers. Photographic prints with after-applied dyes got a bad reputation. I think your E6 lab wanted to assure customers that they didn't use this kind of inferior process.

Wow interesting! The results seem to look totally normal so I guess whatever they did isn’t out of the box. I’ll have to ask them next time I’m in. Maybe it’s just been in the language for their service and somehow ended up online

afriman · May 9, 2023

I think it's probably just a clumsy way of stating that they use the standard E6 process without any form of manipulation. Now that digital post-processing is common, I guess that's a way of trying to explain the absence of altering the image after processing.

DREW WILEY · May 9, 2023

Actual E6 film dyes are chromogenic involving couplers. But Kodak's official chrome film retouching dyes were simply little bottles of surplus dye transfer process dye. The CAS numbers make that obvious.

afriman · May 10, 2023

DREW WILEY said:
Actual E6 film dyes are chromogenic involving couplers. But Kodak's official chrome film retouching dyes were simply little bottles of surplus dye transfer process dye. The CAS numbers make that obvious.

Perhaps the confusion between Kodachrome and E6 among casual "slide film" users, who aren't aware of the different processes, created a misconception among some (or even one?) of their clients that retouching was a general practice. On a more positive note, perhaps the stunning experience of looking at a well-exposed slide makes new users wonder whether such retouching is being done. This is all conjecture, of course...

DREW WILEY · May 10, 2023

Unlike prints, it would be hell to retouch slides per se; maybe something like an 8X10 chrome - but I've never done it even with film that size. Back when sheet film did reign, the bigger labs had a workflow with specialists doing different tasks. A print retoucher or even several of them were routine. But in my time, there were no film retouchers. That might have been a task more related to cleaning up sheet film chromes a little bit prior to making color separations from them in the printing industry, before the era of scanners and digital tools. Let's just say that very few of those little bottles of film retouching colors seem to have sold. Another application would have been big backlit display and advertising transparencies, where any retouching itself had to be transparent - but those tend to be big anyway, and easier to retouch.

mshchem · May 10, 2023

AKodakZen said:
Wow interesting! The results seem to look totally normal so I guess whatever they did isn’t out of the box. I’ll have to ask them next time I’m in. Maybe it’s just been in the language for their service and somehow ended up online

I suspect that they just did a cut and paste. I wouldn't worry.

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