When did color film become viable??

Remember, Gabriel Lippmann won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1908 for his achievement of the photographic reproduction of colour.

To date the Lippmann process is the only way to exactly reproduce a colour photographically. Unfortunately Lippmann plates are a bit slow and are best seen when floating horizontally on a puddle of mercury!

James Clerk Maxwell, the famous scientist, is sometimes credited with taking the first color photograph in the 1860s.

Dye transfers

DanielStone said:

are you referring to people like Hurrell?

idk if he ever shot color. people like him and Herb Ritts shot b/w for most of their work. Ritts shot color as well


you also have to remember people were shooting b/w films for color separations, so you shot 3 sheets one with a R,G, and B filters to combine in printing to make color prints.

i believe this is carbro printing, please tell me if I'm wrong.

this is what Technicolor was I believe, 3 simultaneous rolls of 35mm film being exposed through a beam splitter into R,G,B color channels, and re-combined when projected/edited.

-Dan

Click to expand...

I did just that, when a student at Ryerson Polytechnic University in the 1970s. We produced many, many in-camera separation negatives, initially on Super-XX film, and later on Kodak Separation Negative Film, Type 1, AFAIR. The procedure was to shoot three sheets of film, in camera, through R/G/B filters, and develop them to the desired gamma; no easy feat with Super-XX film!

For dye transfer prints, the negatives were printed onto Kodak Matrix film, developed much like any other B&W film, dyed the appropriate colour, and rolled onto a sheet of dye transfer paper, which was essentially photopaper minus the silver. The result was a glorious, full colour print, which had the then-standard Ektacolor 74 paper beat by a mile. I still have my old DT prints (and sep negs, and matricies, masks, et cetera), and the DT prints look much better, 30 years later, than the conventional Type C prints made via standard neg-pos process.

Later, we made three-colour separation negatives from colour transparancies, which involved making masks from the original transparancies, and these were also printed via the standard DT method.

We also contact printed sep negs onto three sheets of Kodak Fine Grain Positive Film, with each sheet then dye developed in a coupling developer, and the three positives were combined to make a full colour trans. Mine wasn't bad, and it's one of the projects which was never returned to me by the professor teaching my course.

One effect these travails had on me was that I stopped griping about how the colour reproduction with conventional materials, having tried my hand with older, much more difficult and labour intensive methods!

Viable? I still don't think it's ever going to catch on...

DanielStone,

Technicolor had two main features:

-) exposing three separation films in a single motion picture camera.
-) making print films (for the theaters) were the designation `print´ is to be taken literally; by means of a technique similar to Dye Transfer dyes were printed to a base film

The last film in which the whole process was employed was "Lady Killers". From then on that bulky camera was substituted by a modern camera loaded with a single three-layer colour negative film. But the printing was still done the old way, yielding the difference that now first those separations had to be made from the camerafilm in the lab.

Viable is subject to interpretation. It's arguable that color film didn't become viable for fine art until the seventies, when William Eggleston had his show at MOMA and Steven Shore had his show at the Met. In the interview with Steven Shore at the end of the expanded version of his book "Uncommon Places," Shore states that even 4x5 color negative film didn't produce the results he wanted and that he needed to use 8x10.

Tim

I think the development of the color negative masking system (I believe it was in the late 40s) went a long way towards overall viability. This allowed high quality prints to be made in the motion picture industry without the use of the complex Technicolor, as well as high quality paper prints for photographers and consumers.

A separate silver mask, specially made for correcting image dye absorbtion, was introduced in 1941, a integrated one in 1943.
A integrated dye mask serving the same purpose, but based on coloured couplers which lose colour during development, was introduced in 1948. The man behind all that was Hanson of Kodak.

The Dufaycolor films were on the market in rollfilm sizes for well over 20 years (I have no knowledge about their availability in 35mm). It may be they were lower priced than the alternative Kodak & Agfa products and that kept them going. My first colour photos were on a slightly outdated 620 size roll of Dufaycolor around 1956/57 and they have survived to this day. I think the film went off the market around then.

As to when colour photography took off for in the amateur market, my memory is that had already happened before the introduction of the 110 size cartridge. No doubt it encouraged more people to start taking photos, but most users of 126 film & amateurs using 35mm were taking mainly colour by the end of the 60's, if not earlier. Many people around then, will still have albums of square colour prints derived from 126 negs and usually a strange reddish colour too, as most colour papers of those times didn't seem to last!

Brac said:

No doubt it encouraged more people to start taking photos, but most users of 126 film & amateurs using 35mm were taking mainly colour by the end of the 60's, if not earlier.

Click to expand...

If memory serves, 1964 was the year that amateur photogs (in the U.S., at least) were taking more colour than B&W.

In the 1980s, I worked for a photofinisher in Toronto that started (corporate) life as a joint venture in the 1950s, owned by five or six B&W-only labs that wanted to get into the colour finishing market, but needed to pool their financial rescources to do so.

Brac said:

The Dufaycolor films were on the market in rollfilm sizes for well over 20 years (I have no knowledge about their availability in 35mm). It may be they were lower priced than the alternative Kodak & Agfa products and that kept them going. My first colour photos were on a slightly outdated 620 size roll of Dufaycolor around 1956/57 and they have survived to this day.

Click to expand...

The Dufaycolor which we experimented with in the mid-1980's, was, IIRC, expired almost exactly 25 years before that, which would agree with your suggestion of it finishing in the late 50's. It was in factory-packed 35mm cassettes in the usual metal pots, but each film had a gelatine correction filter for the particular batch, in that case a very pale yellow-green. I think that, with the films we were given, there was also the last few feet remaining in a 25ft or 50ft bulk tin, again factory-packed.

I have lantern slides made with the Sanger Shepherd (subtractive) and Jolly additive screen process. Sanger Shepherd slides were made by dye toning a glass plate and some nitrate film to make cyan, magenta and yellow and binding together in register. Jolly screens have RGB lines running parallel, rather than making a diagonal raster like Dufay. The London Science museum used to have a Lipman photograph of a parrot and an Ives stereo Photochromoscope camera and viewer on display, but they might be in store these days.

1-shot cameras with beam-splitters date mainly from 1920s - '30s. Some makes were ?Meinkut (prism splitter), Ensign and Sanger Shepherd. Trichrome carbro prints were made by London commercial labs Colour Photographs Ltd and Studio Sun Ltd. Kodak Dye Transfer was originally called the Eastman Wash-Off Relief Process.

I started my working life tank line processing Kodak E3 and processing fibre base Ektacolor Commercial paper on a Kodak rotary drum processor (CP5 chemistry). Went on to Cibachrome printing for medical photography. Our family Kodachromes date from 1958, on a 35mm rollfilm Kodak Bantam Colorsnap camera.

When I could afford it and had a camera that was good enough to produce slides. The rest is commentary.