The Development of Technicolor

The original Technicolor technology that was developed was a beam-splitter that would take the original image coming through the lens of the camera and split it into two separate images that would then strike two different strips running in a special camera. One film strip would have a red filter placed between it and the beam-splitter and the other film strip would have a green filter. The "red" film strip and the "green" film strip would still look black and white to the naked eye, but each strip would contain different gradations of gray that matched the spectrum of red, yellow, and blue colors.

Wait, that isn't all. When the two strips of red- and green-filtered black-and-white film were developed into negatives, they were then processed with a dye-saturated film stock that was made of a gelatin-like substance. The red-tinted film strip would then be cemented to the green-tinted film strip, and then both would be placed over the original black-and-white film strip. When the extra powerful light of a Technicolor projector passed through all three layers, the result was a color image with almost realistic skin tones and backgrounds.

In the 1930s a third yellow filter film strip was added to the Technicolor process, and the result was even more realistic color images.

It sounds like a simple enough procedure, and it is basically simple technology, but producing a film using the Technicolor system was very, very expensive. First, there was the special camera that was required. Then there was the processing of the film that was anything but cheap.

Even though the technology for producing color film was readily available for years before, only half of the movies released in 1954 were in color. Today, of course, movies are very rarely released in the black-and-white format.

Read more - Technicolor Movies: The History of Dye Transfer Printing