Color Motion Picture Film - Overview

Overview

The first motion pictures were photographed on a simple silver halide photographic emulsion that produced a "black-and-white" image—that is, an image in shades of gray, ranging from black to white, which corresponded 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, not only is the luminance of a subject recorded, but the color of the subject, too. This is accomplished by analyzing the spectrum of colors into several regions (normally three, commonly referred to by their dominant colors, red, green and blue) and recording these regions individually. Current color films do this by means of three layers of differently color-sensitive photographic emulsion coated onto a single strip of film base.

Early color motion picture processes recorded them as completely separate images (e.g., three-strip Technicolor) or adjacent microscopic image fragments (e.g., Dufaycolor). Each photographed color component, initially just a black-and-white record of the luminous intensities in the part of the spectrum it recorded, is processed to produce a transparent dye image in the complementary color. The superimposed dye images combine to synthesize the original colors by the subtractive color method. In some early color processes (e.g., Kinemacolor), 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.