Dufaycolor is an early French and British additive colour photographic film process for motion pictures and stills photography. It was based on a four-colour screen photographic process invented in 1908 by Frenchman Louis Dufay. Dufaycolor worked on the same principles as the Autochrome process, but achieved its result using a slightly different method.[1]
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How it worked
The film base was dyed blue, printed with a mosaic using a resistive greasy ink and bleached. The resulting spaces were then dyed green. The process was repeated at an angle, the new spaces being bleached and dyed red, forming a mosaic of colour filters consisting of a mesh of red, green and blue lines, at approximately one million colour elements per square inch, known as a reseau.[2] When exposed to light through the reseau, the film's emulsion was exposed to a single colour of light. Thus the emulsion behind each color element recorded the tones for each primary colour.[3]
Upon projection, the reseau served to filter the white projected light, so that the colours of the photograph corresponded to those in the recorded scene; for example, red values were only shown in red. The same principle applied to green and blue components.
Development
The process was purchased by British paper manufacturing firm, Spicers, in 1926, who carried out work to turn it into a workable cine film process. It was finally released in 1932.[4]
Use in motion pictures
Dufaycolor was used in only two British-made feature films; Radio Parade of 1935 (1934) for two sequences, and Sons of the Sea (1939), an all-colour film directed by Maurice Elvey.[4] Len Lye also used Dufaycolor for his short films Kaleidoscope (1935), A Colour Box (1935), and Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1940).
Although less expensive than Technicolor, Dufaycolor was still expensive in comparison to black-and-white film. As colour became more common in motion pictures, Dufaycolor was superseded by technologically superior processes, such as Technicolor and Kodachrome. Dufaycolor remained the only successfully implemented additive film stock for motion pictures until Polaroid designed a system using similar principles in the 1970s.[3]
References
- ^ "Image Forming Materials: Tint, Tone and Other Colour Processes". Australian National Film and Sound Archive.. 2008. http://screensound.gov.au/preservation/film_handbook/colour_processes.html. Retrieved 13 March 2009.
- ^ Sowerby, A.L.M. (1961). Dictionary of Photography: A Reference Book for Amateur and Professional Photographers. London: Illife Books Ltd..
- ^ a b "Glossary - Dufaycolor (matrix illustration)". Screen Archive South East. http://sasesearch.brighton.ac.uk/glossary/dufay.php. Retrieved 13 March 2009.
- ^ a b "Dufaycolor - The Spectacle of Reality and British National Cinema". AHRB Centre for British Film and Television Studies.. http://www.bftv.ac.uk/projects/dufaycolor.htm. Retrieved 13 March 2009.
See also
External links
- Color Photography - Dufaycolor, a 1938 article on the process.
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