Technicolor?

first-swedish-feature-film-in-color.html
There were also some economical two-color processes such as Cinecolor and Trucolor that were used as an alternative to Technicolor in the late forties and early fifties. They employed two emulsions which were bi-packed on the same base and two filters, a sort of a orangish red and a blue - the other colors had to fall in between these primaries. Greens were dark olive green and there were no pure yellows. Some examples here -

http://talkieking.blogspot.com/2008/11/first-swedish-feature-film-in-color.html
 

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Thank you Summaron,
As I seem to remember from the movies, the Technicolor skin tones were excellent. Even the poor skin tones of the Cinecolor are way better than what I have been finding in the Presets and Plugins. It seems the idea with the Presets would be to do a final balance of the skin tones and let the other colors fall where ever.
 
See what you started Grape. I am still playing around with this. I have tried all the presets and plugins. They all have some cool effects but the skin tones are rubbish. From what I remember about the technicolor movies and the Aviator, all the skin tones were perfect. I see PS6 has a Technicolor Look Up Table. Has anyone tried this? Adobe's own sample seems to have red faces. Anyway, it has been really interesting reading about and researching the Technicolor processes.

Does this work? It is Technicolor (orange) with the saturation brought down for the skin tones.
Technicolor-Orange-L.jpg


Thanks
Pete
 
Pete,

Honestly - no, they don't look much like technicolor shots to me.
 
The quality of Technicolor (other than its longevity in projection) may not even have been in the process, but in the effort that was put into perfect colour matching - it was accompanied by engineers for every stage from set, wardrobe and make-up design down to projection...
 
Eugene, Thank you for your honesty. I am quite disappointed in the presets I have found, especially in the skin tones. I agree with Sevo that it was probably the engineers and technicians perfecting every detail. I did find one more product, Alien Skin, that I am going to try. It is a plugin, not a preset but it has many popular film looks in addition to the movie looks so it may be worth while. It has a free trial so I will let you know how it works.
Pete
 
In the 1980s Technicolor in the UK processed 'consumer' 35mm colour print film and sold it too, but looking at my 'Technicolor' negatives from that period there is not much more on the film edges other than the frame numbers, the usual 'safety film' marking and some vague (batch?) numbering so I expect that they just bought a standard C41 film in from one of the suppliers who made/make film for others - possibly 3M or Ferrania. I haven't seen the name used on consumer film or them active as a D&P lab for years though.

Regards

Andrew More
 
Ok, so here is the Alien Skin Technicolor 4 setting. I do like the punch it gives to the colors but I do not know if you guys think it looks like Technicolor. Notice there are no people in the picture. Even the Alien Skin has difficulty with the skin tones. I am having a bit of luck with the faded settings though and will put them up. What do you all think?

Trains-TC4-L.jpg
 
Going to collaborate with someone and attempt this with film. Long story. My main concern, however, is once i get the three filters, will i need to compensate exposure by a stop for each filter once i double up? for example, with TTL, if i had yellow and blue together would i need to overexpose by one stop since there are two filters instead of one? or should i keep it at the same shutter speed and let that exposure be two stops under since there are less colors there to record?
 
Grape, From what I have been reading, the Technicolor 4 cameras split the single lens image three ways with a prism and therefore required large amounts of extra lighting. Since you will be shooting three separate exposures, you would not need the extra lighting. I am thinking that if you try to combine all three colors on one color film frame then you will need to underexpose but if you combine later in post with an enlarger or Photoshop, you will probably want properly exposed negatives for each color and just count the single filter factor. You may need to adjust the exposure time in the enlarger. A suggestion; before you invest in glass filters, you could try just holding print viewing filters in front of the lens to see if it gets the right effect. Anyway, I ended up buying the Alien Skin Exposure 4 package because I liked all the film selections but I don't know if it will get the Technicolor look you are looking for. Good Luck!
Pete
 
3rdtrick said:
A suggestion; before you invest in glass filters, you could try just holding print viewing filters in front of the lens to see if it gets the right effect.
Pete
Click to expand...

Where can I find these filters? Whatever's cheap and works is fine with me.
I am collaborating with a silk screen artist using photosensitive screens and my enlarger to make a different screen for each color. The reason I asked if it would make sense to double then triple filters when I do this is so that two of the three exposures aren't redundant with extra color information if they don't need it. I think this is how real technicolor worked. We want it to be a purely mechanical and chemical process, so probably won't use photoshop, though I'll probably use another camera body and take a color picture first as a reference to see what we need to do to get it right.
 
grapejohnson said:
Where can I find these filters? Whatever's cheap and works is fine with me.
Click to expand...

If they are to work, they'll be either used or far from cheap. The most readily available and affordable RGB separation kit would be a Tiffen 29, 47 (or 47b) and 61 (or 58) set. A full kit will be around 180€ for common small sizes - more if you want it big or need an odd size.

If you merely want to experiment, surplus dealers sometimes have polycarbonate filters from three-tube TV beamers for a few pennies - their optical qualities will be way below photographic grade and they might have faded, but at least in original state the colours were right on the point.
 
grapejohnson said:
...for example, with TTL, if i had yellow and blue together would i need to overexpose by one stop since there are two filters instead of one? ...
Click to expand...

If you are using true color separation filters the result of stacking two filters will yield absolutely no exposure. These are band pass filters where the passed range of colors for each filter are mutually exclusive.

In order to "combine" the color range when shooting separation negative, you would need to do two separate exposures, one through each filter, on the same piece of film. You would want to "underexpose" each by 1/2 stop.
 
How is your experiment coming along Grape?

Here is one from Alien Skin 2 strip Technicolor.
Technicolor-2-strip-L.jpg


Is this getting anywhere close?
Pete
 
3rdtrick said:
How is your experiment coming along Grape?

Here is one from Alien Skin 2 strip Technicolor.
Technicolor-2-strip-L.jpg


Is this getting anywhere close?
Pete
Click to expand...

Actually, so far that's probably the best looking Photoshop plugin I've seen here. Project is coming very slowly. The guy I'm working with is pretty flaky. I might learn screen printing in order to do it myself out of curiosity. Having problems finding filters.
 
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