Dye transfer printing an Eggleston print

[myotis]

Not posted in the processing forum as I felt this was probably of wider interest because of the Eggleston connection.

In the olden day of colour film, one of the reasons many of us tended to stick with B/W for personal work was that colour gave much less control over making nuanced prints. And I write as someone who had to make colour-accurate prints for scientific studies.

While you could choose different film stocks (positive or negative) printing always felt restrictive, and there was always this feeling of being largely trapped into accepting results seriously constrained by the limitations of the available colour materials and processing.

Some of us aspired to making dye transfer prints, but none of us got beyond the aspiration stage. The complexity and costs made it beyond our reach, and we were only aware of being used to make prints for "celebrity" status photographers and other "high end" uses.

This 17 minute video shows a dye transfer print being made from one of William Eggleston's photographs. It doesn't go into the details of the process, but it gives a good indication of the work involved.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyBJmQ3kf94

 

[AndrewFlannigan]

While I can see that for technical and commercial work, colour was necessary, it seems that even the millions of dollars spent on cinematic productions never produced convincingly accurate colour.

Perhaps that is the reason why most amateurs stayed away from it, despite the efforts made by companies such as Paterson or Johnson to encourage amateurs to get involved.

 

[Ed Sutton]

While I can see that for technical and commercial work, colour was necessary, it seems that even the millions of dollars spent on cinematic productions never produced convincingly accurate colour.

Perhaps that is the reason why most amateurs stayed away from it, despite the efforts made by companies such as Paterson or Johnson to encourage amateurs to get involved.

More likely amateurs avoided colour because it was more complicated and expensive to deal with at home than black and white.

 

[myotis]

While I can see that for technical and commercial work, colour was necessary, it seems that even the millions of dollars spent on cinematic productions never produced convincingly accurate colour.

Perhaps that is the reason why most amateurs stayed away from it, despite the efforts made by companies such as Paterson or Johnson to encourage amateurs to get involved.

I'm not sure cinema colour has ever been trying for accuracy. Colour in cinema, as far as I am aware, has always been about mood.

I know I've discussed this a few times, but "Accurate" colour differs from "convincing", "pleasing or "realistic" colours. We all interpret colours differently, and we "remember" colours differently from the way we originally saw them. During testing, people universally dislike scientifically accurate colours.

The colour film manufacturers weren't trying to produce accurate colours they were trying to produce colours that people liked, confounded by the problem that not only do individuals interpret colours differently, but groups (geographical, cultural and ethnic) also have some commonality in how they interpret colours.

Fuji had a fairly long article on this at one time and explained how the same people they had working on the psychology of colour when making film were now working on designing how their digital cameras produced colour.

I think I agree with Dave here, I think the main, but not the only, barrier to colour prints being taken up by the "average" amateur enthusiast was cost and complexity. Plus maybe because slides (as a projected image in a darkened room) tended to look better than printed images, for less work.

The modern, apparent popularity of dramatically over-processed colour images doesn't seem to support the idea that people are all that discerning about colour accuracy or realism.