[PRCo] FARTHER OFF TOPIC (COLOR FILM PROCESSES)

[Fred Schneider]

About color photographic processes:  delete now if uninterested.

Thank you.  Incredibly interesting.   I have a limited working knowledge of contemporary and recent printing ... linotype and zinc plates, photo lithography, rotogravure ... but nothing this old.  Obviously it looks like hand colored cards because the master was hand tinted.

Someday before I die I would like to try making a dye transfer print.  The results were always far superior to color printing process except that I think some of the computer work today is as good.  My dad once tried it.  He made a picture of the Pittsburgh house using three separate 6x9 cm negatives, each taken through a red, a
green, or a blue filter ...  Therefore each represented one of the three colors needed to make a print.  What was unique was his use of filters to take original negatives of the subject (the house), rather than starting with a color image and making three separate back and white negatives from the original slide.  If I'm not
mistaken (and let's hope I'm not), the Technicolor movie process is similar with dyes being printed on clear film stock (in contrast to Kodacolor, Ektacolor, Eastmancolor, Kodak Gold, etc. in which the dyes are created during a developing process).  Technicolor dyes were much more stable than Eastmancolor (a lower contrast version
of Kodacolor), therefore the better films of the 1950s and 1960s were done on Technicolor if it was felt up front that the demand would warrant the added cost.  As we well know, movie prints from Eastmancolor, like paper prints from Kodacolor, turned pink in time.



John F Bromley wrote:

> An early color printing process, and one of the prints is being auctioned by Sotheby's.  I tripped across this process 12 years ago in a Toronto newspaper of the early 1900s when I was researching Toronto Railway Co route histories.  This should interest Fred 3 particularly just for the historical aspect of the printing process.
>
> http://cgi.sothebys.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1857323408