At the end of World War 2, when we first became serious about starting our own portrait studio, natural color film did not exist. In order to produce a natural color picture, photography borrowed on the printing industry's method of breaking down a photographed scene into its three elementary colors. Lens filters were used to make three different black and white negatives, each of which represented one of three elementary colors, that were present in the subject scene. The resulting negatives were labeled to indicate which color each negative represented. A typical separation used black and white negatives that represented magenta, cyan and yellow. Sometimes black was added as a fourth color. Printers then made three plates with the three separation negatives, inked them up with different primary colors of ink, and printed them, one over the other in register, thus re-assembling the scene’s original colors. Modern printing may have changed to lithography or some other method of printing but the principle of color separation and re-assembly remains. Photography used the same method of separating colors, but with various methods of re-assembly. Positive films were made from the negatives and were simply dyed and projected onto a white screen at the same time to form a natural color image.
Photographic methods were devised to make natural color permanent images on paper. Many methods were presented as the answer to the problem, but most claims proved to be untested or false. But a very few methods did work and were employed. One method that enjoyed some success was known as a wash-off relief method. In that process the separation negatives were treated chemically to harden the emulsion in proportion to the intensity of image areas. Warm water softened the emulsion so dye was absorbed accordingly, and the dye was transferred to a mordanted paper (chemically treated to accept and to fix the dye) from each color in turn, printed onto the paper in register, with each other. A variation of this method called for treatment of the softened negative images with running warm water, thereby creating an actual relief image which was then inked up with rolled-on appropriate colored greasy ink and printed, each negative in succession, with pressure, on a suitable material. I leave the reader to look up the carbon methods and other methods by which a semblance of natural color was tried. The controls required and the preciseness needed must have resulted in many costly and time-consuming failures, and “success” must have been attained when a mediocre approximation of the natural color resulted.
Making of three-color separation negatives in any one scene required that the subject remain still during the entire procedure. Not only could there not be pictures made of moving objects, but the camera position had to remain steady, and lighting could not vary between exposures, and the subject could not move or change in any way. Cloud movement disallowed most landscape pictures as did wind causing movement in trees and flowers. This kind of problem was partially eliminated with the invention of the one-shot color camera. For the first time, landscape photography and action photography became more possible, even in color. It was a camera that exposed three films at once. With a system of color filters and mirrors inside the camera, it reflected the separated images onto three different films at the same time.
Color film arrived ! But it first arrived in the form of the kind of cut film that was used in large format studio cameras. And it was used in high end advertising photography, but not by small town portrait studios. Initially one 5 x 7 inch sheet of the new color film, a size to fit a small studio camera, would have cost about 16 dollars. After graduating from high school I went to work for a local photographer at a beginning wage of $9.50 for a six day week. Never mind that I, too, considered that slave wages at the time: I use the figure now only to show that the first color film was impossibly expensive. It was not for use by common folk, especially we bumbling common folk who would be apt to use up and waste several sheets of film in the learning how. The exposing properly and the adjusting color temperature of the lights, and the complications of chemical development…well, we adopted a sincere defense in retaining our preference for real black and white photography...where real artists were at work, painting with light and all. Applying heavy oil paints, by hand, to render a sepia toned black and white enlargement into a vibrant colored portrait, like Rembrandt.