This is a list of color film processes known to have been created for photographing and exhibiting motion pictures in color since the first attempts were made in the late 1890s. It is limited to "natural color" processes, meaning processes in which the color is photographically recorded and reproduced rather than artificially added by hand-painting, stencil coloring, or other arbitrary "colorization" methods.
Process | Year | Projection method | Inventor(s) | Introductory film |
---|---|---|---|---|
Lee-Turner Colour | 1899 | Additive (3 color) | Edward Raymond Turner [1] [2] | N/A (Experimental) (circa 1902) |
Biocolour | 1905 | Additive (2 color) | William Friese-Greene | Untitled Film (1906) [3] |
Kinemacolor | 1906 | Additive (2 color) | George Albert Smith | Representatives of the British Isles (1909) [4] |
Warner-Powrie | 1906 | Mosaic (3 color) | John Hutchison Powrie | Untitled film (1928) |
Keller-Dorian | 1908 | Lenticular (3 color) | Albert Keller-Dorian Rodolphe Berthon | Unknown |
Cinecolorgraph | 1912 | Subtractive (2 color) | A. Hernandez-Mejia | Unknown |
Brewster Color (I) | 1913 | Subtractive (2 color) | Percy Douglas Brewster | Unknown |
Chronochrome a.k.a. Gaumont Color | 1913 | Additive (3 color) | Leon Gaumont | Unknown |
Prizma (I) | 1913 | Additive (2 color) | William van Doren Kelley | Our Navy (1917) |
Cinechrome | 1914 | Additive (3 color) | Colin Bennett | Prince of Wales in India (1921) |
Kodachrome (I) | 1916 | Subtractive (2 color) | John G. Capstaff Eastman-Kodak | Concerning $1,000 |
Technicolor (I) | 1916 | Additive (2 color) | Daniel F. Comstock Herbert Kalmus W. Burton Wescott | The Gulf Between (1917) |
Douglass Color (Douglass Natural Color) | 1918 | Additive (2 color) | Leon Forrest Douglass | Nature Scenes (1918) and Cupid Angling (1918) |
Kesdacolor | 1918 | Subtractive (2 color) | William van Doren Kelley Carroll H. Dunning | American Flag (1918) |
Prizma (II) | 1918 | Subtractive (2 color) | William van Doren Kelley | The Glorious Adventure (1922) |
Gilmore Color | 1918 | Additive (2 color) | Frederic Eugene Ives Otto C. Gilmore | Unknown |
Zoechrome | 1920 | Subtractive (3 color) | T.A. Mills | Unknown |
ColorCraft | 1921 | Subtractive (2 color) | W.H. Peck | Unknown |
Polychromide | 1922 | Additive (2 color) | Aron Hamburger | Unknown |
Technicolor (II) | 1922 | Subtractive (2 color) | Daniel F. Comstock Joseph A. Ball Leonard T. Troland Jarvis M. Andrews | The Toll of the Sea (1922) |
Szczepanik | 1924 | Additive (3 color) | Jan Szczepanik | Unknown |
Kelleycolor | 1926 | Subtractive (2 color) | William van Doren Kelley Max Handschiegl | Unknown |
Color Cinema Corporation | 1927 | Subtractive (2 color) | Color Cinema Corporation | Unknown |
Lignose Naturfarbenfilm | 1927 | Additive (3 color) | Lignose | Unknown |
Busch Color | 1928 | Additive (2 color) | Unknown | |
Harriscolor | 1928 | Subtractive (2 color) | William Van Doren Kelley | Unknown |
Kodacolor (I) | 1928 | Lenticular (3 color) | Rodolphe Berthon | N/A (16 mm home movies only) (1928) |
Raycol | 1928 | Additive (2 color) | Maurice Elvey | The School for Scandal (1930) |
Splendicolor | 1928 | Subtractive (3 color) | Unknown | |
Technicolor (III) | 1928 | Subtractive (2 color) | Daniel F. Comstock | The Viking (1928) |
Agfa bipack | 1929 | Subtractive (2 color) | Agfa | Unknown |
Horst Color | 1929 | Additive (3 color) | L. Horst | Unknown |
Multicolor | 1929 | Subtractive (2 color) | William Thomas Crespinel | Unknown |
Finlay | 1929 | Additive (3 color) | Clare l. Finlay | Unknown |
Harriscolor | 1929 | Subtractive (2 color) | J.B. Harris Jr. | Unknown |
Cinechrome | 1930 | Unknown | Cinecolor Ltd. | Unknown |
Cineoptichrome | 1930 | Additive (2 color) | Lucien Roux Armand Roux | Unknown |
Dascolor | 1930 | Subtractive (2 color) | M. L. F. Dassonville | Unknown |
Harmonicolor | 1930 | Additive (2 color) | Maurice Combs | Talking Hands (1936) |
Hirlicolor | 1930 | Subtractive (2 color) | George A. Hirliman | Captain Calamity (1936) |
Photocolor | 1930 | Subtractive (2 color) | Photocolor Corp. | The Gift of Montezuma (1930) |
Pilney Color | 1930 | Subtractive (2 color) | Unknown | |
Allfarbenfilm | 1930 | Additive (3 color) | Unknown | |
Sennettcolor | 1930 | Subtractive (2 color) | Mack Sennett (financier) | Strange Birds (1930) |
Sirius Color | 1930 | Subtractive (2 color) | L. Horst | Unknown |
Brewster Color (II) | 1930 | Subtractive (2 or 3 color) | Percy Douglas Brewster | Autumn Foliage (1930) |
UFAcolor a.k.a. Chemicolor, Spectracolor | 1930 | Subtractive (2 color) | UFA Studios | Pagliacci (1936) |
Vitacolor | 1930 | Additive (2 color) | William Van Doren Kelley Max B. Du Pont (financier) | Unknown |
Chimicolor | 1931 | Subtractive (3 color) | Syndicate de la Cinematographe des Couleurs | Unknown |
Magnacolor | 1931 | Subtractive (2 color) | Consolidated Laboratories | The Bold Caballero (1936) |
Dufaycolor | 1931 | Mosaic (3 color) | Louis Dufay Dufay-Chromex Co. | Sons of the Sea (1939) |
DuPack | 1931 | Subtractive (2 color) | DuPont Co. | Unknown |
Rota Farbenfilm | 1931 | Subtractive (2 color) | Unknown | |
Russian two-color system | 1931 | Subtractive (2 color) | Nikolai Agokos Fedor Provorov Pavel Mershin | Karnaval cvetov (1935) |
AGFAcolor (I) | 1932 | Lenticular (3 color) | AGFA | N/A (16mm only) |
Cinecolor (I) | 1932 | Subtractive (2 color) | William T. Crispinel Alan M. Gundelfinger | Sweden, Land of the Vikings (1934) Honeymoon Hotel (1934) |
Technicolor (IV) | 1932 | Subtractive (3 color) | Joseph A. Ball | Flowers and Trees (1932) |
Morgana Color | 1932 | Additive (2 color) | Bell and Howell Lady Juliet Williams | N/A (16mm only) |
Gasparcolor | 1933 | Subtractive (3 color) | Bela Gaspar | Kreise (1933) and Muratti Greift Ein (1934) |
Vericolor | 1933 | Subtractive (2 color) | Vericolor Inc. | The Magic Isle (1935) |
Francita Process a.k.a. Opticolor (UK) | 1935 | Additive (3 color) | British Realita Syndica, Ltd. | Jeunies filles à marier (1935) |
Kodachrome (II) | 1935 | Subtractive (3 color) | Eastman Kodak | N/A (16mm only) |
Cosmocolor | 1935 | Subtractive (2 color) | Otto C. Gilmore | Wings Over the Golden Gate (1935) |
Russian three-color process | 1936 | Subtractive (3 color) | Pavel Mershin Fedor Provorov Avenir Min | The Fox and the Wolf (1937) |
Telco-Color | 1936 | Subtractive (3 color) | Cavalcade of Texas (1938) | |
Dunningcolor | 1937 | Subtractive (3 color) | Carroll H. Dunning Dodge Dunning | Tehauntepec (1937) |
AGFAColor (II) a.k.a. Sovcolor, Chrome Color Art Chrome Color, ORWO color | 1939 | Subtractive (3 color) | I.G. Farben | Frauen sind doch bessere Diplomaten (1939–41) |
Thomascolor | 1942 | Additive (3 color) | Richard Thomas | Unknown |
Cinefotocolor | 1947 | Subtractive (2 color) | Daniel Aragonés | El un rincón de España (1948) |
Fullcolor | 1947 | Subtractive (3 color) | The Goldwyn Follies (1947 reissue) | |
Rouxcolor | 1947 | Additive (3 color) | Lucien Roux Armand Roux | The Miller's Daughter (1948) |
Thomson Color | 1947 | Lenticular (3 color) | Société Thomson | Jour de fête (1949, color version not released until 1994) |
Cinecolor (II) a.k.a. SuperCineColor | 1948 | Subtractive (3 color) | Alan M. Gundelfinger | The Sword of Monte Cristo (1951) |
Konicolor | 1948 | Subtractive (3 color) | Konishi Roku | |
Magicolor | 1947 | Subtractive (3 color) | The Humpbacked Horse (a.k.a. The Magic Horse, 1947) | |
Polacolor | 1948 | Subtractive (3 color) | Polaroid Corp. | Unknown |
Technichrome | 1948 | Subtractive (2 Color) | Technicolor Company of England | The Olympic Games of 1948 |
Trucolor (II) | 1948 | Subtractive (3 color) | Republic Pictures Consolidated Film Industries | This is Korea (1951) |
Eastmancolor a.k.a. DeLuxe Color Metrocolor Pathécolor (II) WarnerColor and Technicolor (after 1954) | 1950 | Subtractive (3 color) | Eastman Kodak | Royal Journey (1951) |
Alfacolour a.k.a. Alfacolor | 1950 | Subtractive (2 color) | Alpha Photographic Laboratories | Unknown |
Ansco Color | 1952 | Subtractive (3 color) | General Aniline and Film Corp. | Climbing the Matterhorn (1948) |
Dugromacolor | 1952 | Additive (3 color) | Dumas, Grosset, and Marx | Unknown |
Ferraniacolor | 1952 | Subtractive (3 color) | Toto in Color (1952) | |
Fox Lenticular Film | 1953 | Lenticular (3 color) | Twentieth Century-Fox | N/A (experimental) |
Fujicolor | 1953 | Subtractive (3 color) | Adventure of Natsuko (1953) | |
Polavision | 1977 | Additive (3 color) mosaic | Polaroid Corp. | Super 8mm only |
Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed in many fields of science, manufacturing, and business, as well as its more direct uses for art, film and video production, recreational purposes, hobby, and mass communication.
The following list comprises significant milestones in the development of photography technology.
Additive color or additive mixing is a property of a color model that predicts the appearance of colors made by coincident component lights, i.e. the perceived color can be predicted by summing the numeric representations of the component colors. Modern formulations of Grassmann's laws describe the additivity in the color perception of light mixtures in terms of algebraic equations. Additive color predicts perception and not any sort of change in the photons of light themselves. These predictions are only applicable in the limited scope of color matching experiments where viewers match small patches of uniform color isolated against a grey or black background.
The Autochrome Lumière was an early color photography process patented in 1903 by the Lumière brothers in France and first marketed in 1907. Autochrome was an additive color "mosaic screen plate" process. It was the principal color photography process in use before the advent of subtractive color film in the mid-1930s.
Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky was a Russian chemist and photographer. He is best known for his pioneering work in colour photography and his effort to document early 20th-century Russia.
Color photography is a type of photography that uses media capable of capturing and reproducing colors. By contrast, black-and-white or gray-monochrome photography records only a single channel of luminance (brightness) and uses media capable only of showing shades of gray.
An RG color model is a dichromatic color model represented by red and green primary colors. These can only reproduce only a fraction of the colors possible with a trichromatic color space, such as for human color vision.
Panchromatic emulsion is a type of black-and-white photographic emulsion that is sensitive to all wavelengths of visible light. By extension, a panchromatic sensor is an image sensor sensitive to the whole visible spectrum. A panchromatic image is the resulting picture.
Kinemacolor was the first successful colour motion picture process. Used commercially from 1909 to 1915, it was invented by George Albert Smith in 1906. It was a two-colour additive colour process, photographing a black-and-white film behind alternating red/orange and blue/green filters and projecting them through red and green filters. It was demonstrated several times in 1908 and first shown to the public in 1909. From 1909 on, the process was known and trademarked as Kinemacolor and was marketed by Charles Urban’s Natural Color Kinematograph Company, which sold Kinemacolor licences around the world.
The history of photography began with the discovery of two critical principles: The first is camera obscura image projection, the second is the discovery that some substances are visibly altered by exposure to light. There are no artifacts or descriptions that indicate any attempt to capture images with light sensitive materials prior to the 18th century.
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 Prizma Color system was a color motion picture process, invented in 1913 by William Van Doren Kelley and Charles Raleigh. Initially, it was a two-color additive color system, similar to its predecessor, Kinemacolor. However, Kelley eventually transformed Prizma into a bi-pack color system that itself became the predecessor for future color processes such as Multicolor and Cinecolor.
Dufaycolor is an early British additive colour photographic film process, introduced for motion picture use in 1932 and for still photography in 1935. It was derived from Louis Dufay's Dioptichrome plates, a glass-based product for colour still photography, introduced in France in 1909. Both Dioptichrome and Dufaycolor worked on the same principles as the Autochrome process, but achieved their results using a layer of tiny colour filter elements arrayed in a regular geometric pattern, unlike Autochrome's random array of coloured starch grains. The manufacture of Dufaycolor film ended in the late 1950s.
In motion pictures, Kodak's Kodacolor brand was originally associated with an early lenticular color motion picture process, first introduced in 1928 for 16mm film. The process was based on the Keller-Dorian system of color photography.
A field-sequential color system (FSC) is a color television system in which the primary color information is transmitted in successive images and which relies on the human vision system to fuse the successive images into a color picture. One field-sequential system was developed by Peter Goldmark for CBS, which was its sole user in commercial broadcasting. It was first demonstrated to the press on September 4, 1940, and first shown to the general public on January 12, 1950. The Federal Communications Commission adopted it on October 11, 1950, as the standard for color television in the United States, but it was later withdrawn.
In bipack color photography for motion pictures, two strips of black-and-white 35 mm film, running through the camera emulsion to emulsion, are used to record two regions of the color spectrum, for the purpose of ultimately printing the images, in complementary colors, superimposed on one strip of film. The result is a multicolored projection print that reproduces a useful but limited range of color by the subtractive color method. Bipack processes became commercially practical in the early 1910s when Kodak introduced duplitized film print stock, which facilitated making two-color prints.
Thomas Sutton was an English photographer, author, and inventor.
Technicolor is a series of color motion picture processes, the first version dating back to 1916, and followed by improved versions over several decades.
Edward Raymond Turner was a pioneering British inventor and cinematographer. He produced the earliest known colour motion picture film footage.
The history of film technology traces the development of techniques for the recording, construction and presentation of motion pictures. When the film medium came about in the 19th century, there already was a centuries old tradition of screening moving images through shadow play and the magic lantern that were very popular with audiences in many parts of the world. Especially the magic lantern influenced much of the projection technology, exhibition practices and cultural implementation of film. Between 1825 and 1840, the relevant technologies of stroboscopic animation, photography and stereoscopy were introduced. For much of the rest of the century, many engineers and inventors tried to combine all these new technologies and the much older technique of projection to create a complete illusion or a complete documentation of reality. Colour photography was usually included in these ambitions and the introduction of the phonograph in 1877 seemed to promise the addition of synchronized sound recordings. Between 1887 and 1894, the first successful short cinematographic presentations were established. The biggest popular breakthrough of the technology came in 1895 with the first projected movies that lasted longer than 10 seconds. During the first years after this breakthrough, most motion pictures lasted about 50 seconds, lacked synchronized sound and natural colour, and were mainly exhibited as novelty attractions. In the first decades of the 20th century, movies grew much longer and the medium quickly developed into one of the most important tools of communication and entertainment. The breakthrough of synchronized sound occurred at the end of the 1920s and that of full color motion picture film in the 1930s. By the start of the 21st century, physical film stock was being replaced with digital film technologies at both ends of the production chain by digital image sensors and projectors.
patented his colour process on 22 March 1899