Color Film

Color film is photographic film that records a scene in color, typically through an integral tripack of three superimposed silver halide emulsions sensitized to red, green, and blue light. It replaced separation negatives and additive screen plates such as the Autochrome, marketed by the Lumière brothers from 1907. Kodak's Kodachrome, devised by Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky, appeared in 1935 as the first commercially successful multilayer film and reached 35mm still cameras in 1936. Agfacolor Neu followed in 1936 with dye couplers built into the emulsion, which simplified processing. Kodacolor, launched in 1942 as the first color negative film for prints, opened the era of the mass-market color snapshot.

During development, oxidized developer reacts with dye couplers to form cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes, and the silver is then bleached and fixed away. Transparency film yields a positive image with fine grain, saturated color, and narrow exposure latitude. Negative film, now processed in C-41 chemistry, carries an orange mask that compensates for imperfect dyes, tolerates exposure errors, and leaves color balance adjustable in printing. Most stocks are balanced for daylight and flash at about 5,500 K, with tungsten emulsions or conversion filters used under artificial light. Stephen Shore made Uncommon Places with an 8-by-10-inch view camera and color negative film, while William Eggleston printed much of his color work through dye transfer, a process previously used mainly in advertising.

For decades color film was associated with amateurs and advertising, and many art photographers considered it commercial or garish. Walker Evans wrote in 1969 that color photography was "vulgar." MoMA's 1976 exhibition William Eggleston's Guide, with the work of Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, and Joel Sternfeld, is commonly credited with establishing color in art photography, a shift often called the New Color Photography. Color film is most often contrasted with Black-and-White, and its image of dye clouds rather than metallic silver makes it prone to fading and color shift. It is broader than Reversal Film, which names the transparency branch alone, and is closely tied to the Chromogenic Print, the dye-coupler paper on which most color negatives are printed. Kodachrome production ended in 2009, while Ektachrome E100 returned in 2018 amid renewed interest in analog photography.