Color motion picture film
Color motion picture film refers both to unexposed color photographic film in a format suitable for use in a motion picture camera, and to finished motion picture film, ready for use in a projector, which bears images in color.
The first color cinematography was by additive color systems such as the one patented by Edward Raymond Turner in 1899 and tested in 1902. A simplified additive system was successfully commercialized in 1909 as Kinemacolor. These early systems used black-and-white film to photograph and project two or more component images through different color filters.
During the 1930s, the first practical subtractive color processes were introduced. These also used black-and-white film to photograph multiple color-filtered source images, but the final product was a multicolored print that did not require special projection equipment. Before 1932, when three-strip Technicolor was introduced, commercialized subtractive processes used only two color components and could reproduce only a limited range of color.
In 1935, Kodachrome was introduced, followed by Agfacolor in 1936. They were intended primarily for amateur home movies and "slides". These were the first films of the "integral tripack" type, coated with three layers of different color-sensitive emulsion, which is usually what is meant by the words "color film" as commonly used. The few color photographic films still being made in the 2020s are of this type. The first color negative films and corresponding print films were modified versions of these films. They were introduced around 1940 but only came into wide use for commercial motion picture production in the early 1950s. In the US, Eastman Kodak's Eastmancolor was the usual choice, but it was often re-branded with another trade name, such as "WarnerColor", by the studio or the film processor.
Later color films were standardized into two distinct processes: Eastman Color Negative 2 chemistry and Eastman Color Positive 2 chemistry, usually abbreviated as ECN-2 and ECP-2. Fuji's products are compatible with ECN-2 and ECP-2.
The transition happened gradually, with 10% color in the early 1950s and 90% in the middle 1970s when considering all live-action feature films produced worldwide, and a tipping point in 1967. Film was the dominant form of cinematography until the 2010s, when it was largely replaced by digital cinematography.
Overview
The first motion pictures were photographed using a simple homogeneous photographic emulsion that yielded a black-and-white image—that is, an image in shades of gray, ranging from black to white, corresponding to the luminous intensity of each point on the photographed subject. Light, shade, form and movement were captured, but not color.With color motion picture film, information about the color of the light at each image point is also captured. This is done by analyzing the visible spectrum of color into several regions and recording each region separately.
Current color films do this with three layers of differently color-sensitive photographic emulsion coated on one strip of film base. Early processes used color filters to photograph the color components as completely separate images or adjacent microscopic image fragments in a one-layer black-and-white emulsion.
Each photographed color component, initially just a colorless record of the luminous intensities in the part of the spectrum that it captured, is processed to produce a transparent dye image in the color complementary to the color of the light that it recorded. The superimposed dye images combine to synthesize the original colors by the subtractive color method. In some early color processes, the component images remained in black-and-white form and were projected through color filters to synthesize the original colors by the additive color method.
Tinting and manual coloring
The earliest motion picture stocks were orthochromatic, and recorded blue and green light, but not red. Recording all three spectral regions required making film stock panchromatic to some degree. As orthochromatic film stock hindered color photography in its beginnings, the first films with color in them used aniline dyes to create artificial color. Manual-colored films appeared in 1895 with Thomas Edison's manual-painted Annabelle's Dance for his Kinetoscope viewers.Many early filmmakers from the first ten years of film also used this method to some degree. George Méliès offered manual-painted prints of his own films at an additional cost over the black-and-white versions, including the visual-effects pioneering A Trip to the Moon. The film had various parts of the film painted frame-by-frame by twenty-one women in Montreuil in a production-line method.
The first commercially successful stencil color process was introduced in 1905 by Segundo de Chomón working for Pathé Frères. Pathé Color, renamed Pathéchrome in 1929, became one of the most accurate and reliable stencil coloring systems. It incorporated an original print of a film with sections cut by pantograph in the appropriate areas for up to six colors by a coloring machine with dye-soaked, velvet rollers. After a stencil had been made for the whole film, it was placed into contact with the print to be colored and run at high speed through the coloring machine. The process was repeated for each set of stencils corresponding to a different color. By 1910, Pathé had over 400 women employed as stencilers in their Vincennes factory. Pathéchrome continued production through the 1930s.
A more common technique emerged in the early 1910s known as film tinting, a process in which either the emulsion or the film base is dyed, giving the image a uniform monochromatic color. This process was popular during the silent era, with specific colors employed for certain narrative effects.
A complementary process, called toning, replaces the silver particles in the film with metallic salts or mordanted dyes. This creates a color effect in which the dark parts of the image are replaced with a color. Tinting and toning were sometimes applied together.
In the United States, St. Louis engraver Max Handschiegl and cinematographer Alvin Wyckoff created the Handschiegl Color Process, a dye-transfer equivalent of the stencil process, first used in Joan the Woman directed by Cecil B. DeMille, and used in special effects sequences for films such as The Phantom of the Opera.
Eastman Kodak introduced its own system of pre-tinted black-and-white film stocks called Sonochrome in 1929. The Sonochrome line featured films tinted in seventeen different colors including Peachblow, Inferno, Candle Flame, Sunshine, Purple Haze, Firelight, Azure, Nocturne, Verdante, Aquagreen, Caprice, Fleur de Lis, Rose Doree, and the neutral-density Argent, which kept the screen from becoming excessively bright when switching to a black-and-white scene.
Tinting and toning continued to be used well into the sound era. In the 1930s and 1940s, some western films were processed in a sepia-toning solution to evoke the feeling of old photographs of the day. Tinting was used as late as 1951 for Sam Newfield's sci-fi film Lost Continent for the green lost-world sequences. Alfred Hitchcock used a form of manual-coloring for the orange-red gun-blast at the audience in Spellbound. Kodak's Sonochrome and similar pre-tinted stocks were still in production until the 1970s and were used commonly for custom theatrical trailers and snipes.
In the last half of the 20th century, Norman McLaren, who was one of the pioneers in animated movies, made several animated films in which he directly manually painted the images, and in some cases, also the soundtrack, on each frame of the film. This approach was previously employed in the early years of movies, late 19th and early 20th century. One of the precursors in color manual painting frame by frame were the Aragonese Segundo de Chomón and his French wife Julienne Mathieu, who were Melies' close competitors.
Tinting was gradually replaced by natural color techniques.
Physics of light and color
A three-color theory of combination, which informs that all colors are created by combining the three main hues of red, blue, and green, was first established by Thomas Young and Hermann von Helmholtz, in the early 19th century.These principles on which color photography is based were first proposed by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1855 and presented at the Royal Society in London in 1861. By that time, it was known that light comprises a spectrum of different wavelengths that are perceived as different colors as they are absorbed and reflected by natural objects. Maxwell discovered that all natural colors in this spectrum as perceived by the human eye may be reproduced with additive combinations of three primary colors—red, green, and blue—which, when mixed equally, produce white light.
Between 1900 and 1935, dozens of natural color systems were introduced, although only a few were successful.
Additive color
The first color systems that appeared in motion pictures were additive color systems. Additive color was practical because no special color stock was necessary. Black-and-white film could be processed and used in both filming and projection. The various additive systems entailed the use of color filters on both the movie camera and projector. Additive color adds lights of the primary colors in various proportions to the projected image. Because of the limited amount of space to record images on film, and later because the lack of a camera that could record more than two strips of film at once, most early motion-picture color systems consisted of two colors, often red and green or red and blue.The pioneering three-color additive system was patented in England by Edward Raymond Turner in 1899. It used a rotating set of red, green and blue filters to photograph the three color components one after the other on three successive frames of panchromatic black-and-white film. The finished film was projected through similar filters to reconstitute the color. In 1902, Turner shot test footage to demonstrate his system, but projecting it proved problematic because of the accurate registration of the three separate color elements required for acceptable results. Turner died a year later without having satisfactorily projected the footage. In 2012, curators at the National Media Museum in Bradford, UK, had the original custom-format nitrate film copied to black-and-white 35 mm film, which was then scanned into a digital video format by telecine. Finally, digital image processing was used to align and combine each group of three frames into one color image. As a result, these films from 1902 became viewable in full color.
Practical color in the motion picture business began with Kinemacolor, first demonstrated in 1906. This was a two-color system created in England by George Albert Smith, and commercialized by film pioneer Charles Urban's Natural Color Kinematograph Company from 1909 on. It was used for a many films, most notably the documentary With Our King and Queen Through India, depicting the Delhi Durbar, which was filmed in December 1911. The Kinemacolor process consisted of alternating frames of specially sensitized black-and-white film exposed at 32 frames per second through a rotating filter with alternating red and green areas. The printed film was projected through similar alternating red and green filters at the same speed. A perceived range of colors resulted from the blending of the separate red and green alternating images by the viewer's persistence of vision.
William Friese-Greene invented another additive color system called Biocolour, which was developed by his son Claude Friese-Greene after William's death in 1921. William sued George Albert Smith, alleging that the Kinemacolor process infringed on the patents for his Bioschemes, Ltd.; as a result, Smith's patent was revoked in 1914. Both Kinemacolor and Biocolour had problems with "fringing" or "haloing" of the image, due to the separate red and green images not fully matching up.
By their nature, these additive systems were very wasteful of light. Absorption by the color filters involved meant that only a minor fraction of the projection light actually reached the screen, resulting in an image that was dimmer than a typical black-and-white image. The larger the screen, the dimmer the picture. For this and other case-by-case reasons, the use of additive processes for theatrical motion pictures had been almost completely abandoned by the early 1940s, though additive color methods are employed by all the color video and computer display systems in common use today.