splitload Loc: Central Flordia

When was color print film first available to the general home photographer?

User ID

According to google, it was a while ago.

I asked both Serie and Alexa and they had a cat fight over a minor detail so I just backed away quietly.

Ysarex Loc: St. Louis

Early 1930s.

E.L.. Shapiro Loc: Ottawa, Ontario Canada

In 1939 Agfa, in Germany used negative stock for motion picture production. 1n 1942 Kodak introduced Kodacolor.

After WWII the "spoils system" allowed American industries to take over German patients. Fine-grain black and white film that first emerged in Germany were produced by Ansco and Kodak after the war. Kodacolor appeared shortly thereafter.

I don't know all the complexities having to do with international patent law. At the old Army Pictorial Center at Astoria, N.Y. where I took some of my specialists traing there was lots of information to this effect in the archives- photographic chemical and mechanical engineering document written in German.

I shot my first roll of Kodacolor 120 in 1955, at the age of 11 in a Koda Brownie Hawkeye camera. I had the film processed through the local drugstore where it was sent to a local photofinisher licensed by Kodak.

In my professional career in commercial photography I shot thousands of roll and sheets of color negative films. The professional emulsions were called Ektacolor, Vericolor, Portra, and Ektar but they were alll improved derivations of the original Kodacolor. Of course, Agfa, Ansco (GAF), and Fuji all, at one time, had their products on the market as well. At one time there were probably over 50 products on the market to select from in every size, a wide variety of speeds, and light sources. Many colr print papers were compatible with the process.

Modern color negative films have enormous latitude, great dynamic range, and when printed correctly, can produce accurate, rich, and beautifully saturated colors.

billnikon Loc: Pennsylvania/Ohio/Florida/Maui/Oregon/Vermont

Color photography for the average person became popular in the early 1960s. Up until then most film used was black and white.

E.L.. Shapiro Loc: Ottawa, Ontario Canada

I don't know about that! I don't have the statistics but I do know that Kodachrome was introduced in 1935- 9 years before I was born. I can remember many folks were shooting slides, even 3-D slides all through the 1950s. I grew up with seeing slide shows every time we visited friends and family. Seems everyone had a slide projector and a screen. Everyone was shooting 8mm Kodachrome movies as well. Some of the slide shows and movies were quite funny and entertaining and others were boring but we sat them nonetheless and applauded at the end of each presentation.

I guess "drugstore" photofinishing was primarily black and white but avid snapshooters, serious enthusiasts, and professionals were shooting color like crazy.

On the professional side-clients always craved COLOR! they woud pay additional fees for hand-colored portraits. Studios were reluctant to sell "natural" color for fear of fading prints. Most weddig were shot in large format and the price of film, processing, and printing was prohibitive. So...folks still wanted color so the woud order stereo slides to be shot alongside the black and white coverage of their weddings. There was a piggy-back bracted that enabled a Stereo_Realist camera to be mounted o atop a Speed Graphic with a shared rangefinder. It was kind cumbersome and bulky- great for me because my first shooting job as an assistant was to shoot the slides independently alongside the main shooter. Great on the job traing in posing, lighting, and candid shooting!

In 1962 a NEW color lab opened in Florida. Believe it or not, it was called "Monkey Color" and advertised professional photofinishing, to the trade, of color negative roll film for the same price as black and white- 50 CENTS a print- textured and lacquered 8x10s right off the rolls NO PROOFS! Studios responded in kind and offered color wedding coverage the same price as black and white and the industry exploded! The lab was owned by a New York City album maker called EMG Leather Arts and the offered leather-bound "library style" albums along with the lab services. Imagine all that back in the 60s!

DaveD65 Loc: Queen City, Ohio

I was a military photo-journalist in the Army in the early 70s, we were only authorized to use B&W for official business. I'm sure that changed later, but when I was discharged B&W was all we were SUPPOSED to use.

MrPhotog

I believe around 1950 or 1951. It was invented years before that, but WWII caused obvious disruptions to producing lots of materials to home consumers. Color print film was one of these.

Many of the older roll film cameras had to be adapted to use color film. Some had problems with light leaking through the red window used to advance the film. So, new models came on the market. These had two or three apertures and were marked for black and white, or color. Amateur cameras rarely used f/stop numbers. The aperture settings would say something like ‘daylight’ or ‘overcast’ or have images of a sun or a cloud. The color film was about an ASA (now ISO) of 50 and most black and white film was about 100, or twice as sensitive. At about the same time blue-tinted flash bulbs were introduced for use with color film. The clear flash bulbs were fine for black and white but produced color prints (and slides) that were far too orange.

Color slide film, however, was available in the late 1930s and the war made 35 mm cameras popular. The same Kodachrome film emulsion was used in amateur-owned 8 mm and 16 mm movie films, and there is plenty of existing footage of color movies shot by servicemen during the war. European companies made competing products at the time, which rarely made it to the US because of war shortages.

I read that Kodak offered a service for making prints from your slides (Kodachrome prints) on a reversal paper. I’ve seen old references to the process but I’ve never seen any of the actual prints. If these actually used the Kodachrome process they should still be vibrant today. These prints would have been available in the 1940s, or maybe earlier. I don’t know when these stopped.

In the 1970s I worked in a camera store. At that time, When you sent a slide to Kodak for a print they would optically copy it onto 35 mm negative film, process that to make an internegative, then make a standard Kodacolor print. They usually trashed the internegative, but sometimes these would be included with the prints. Much to the surprise of the customer, and requiring an explanation from the store clerk. Of course, if you actually wanted an internegative you would pay extra for one! I’m not sure when they started that process. There was an advantage to the internegative. It decreased the contrast and made a better-looking print.

splitload Loc: Central Flordia

Thank you all for the quick and informative replies, this settles a family disagreement

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

The company I worked for in 1975-1996, Delmar Studios, started processing long roll color film for school portraits in 1957. Vince O'Connor, a young darkroom technician from Alderman Studios in High Point, moved to Charlotte, NC to run the color side of the lab. He ultimately became a VP there, running the whole lab at two different points of his career.

By the time I got there, Delmar was buying several tractor-trailer loads of master rolls of color paper from Kodak, taking delivery several times in the Fall. We had our own paper slitting department to cut 40" wide by 5600' rolls down to many different widths to go in our home-built, proprietary, fully automated, networked printers. We had four Pako CP6000 processors, custom modified to process 32' per minute on three strands of 10" or 11" paper. That lab usually ran 24/7 from late August to Thanksgiving. We outgrew it in '85, and moved to a new lab in 1988. As technology evolved, the footprint required shrank, and after Herff Jones bought us, we incorporated three other school labs into Charlotte, before Lifetouch bought us in 2011. They closed it in 2015, as the market contracted due to the digital convergence of social media, smartphones, and the Internet.

Architect1776 Loc: In my mind

Around 1940.

E.L.. Shapiro Loc: Ottawa, Ontario Canada

I remember you describing yourself as a "lab-rat"! In comparison, my color lab experience classifies me as a "Lab-Mouse". The school operation you describe sounds enormous. I had friends that worked at some of the U.S. labs- Hallmark, Misael Photochrome, Gittings, and others so I have some idea of theses big operations. In the busy season our paper and chemistry came in a panel van not- an 18 wheeler. We did operate a few Pako dip-dunk processors, 2 Kreonite roller transport print processors, a few S- printers, and 4 custom enlarging stations and I had all I can do just to keep those machines in control. I can't imagine anything much larger without a very large and skilled crew.

The "senior" and school business in Canada was never as large as it was in the U.S. My "school" experience was with university faculties- usually medicine, nursing, law and education, and a few graduate school faculties. We did shoot on 70mm long rolls for several years and outsourced the film processing.

I would have outsourced all of our printing if there was a decent quality lab in our city at the time. The local labs were inconsistent and deliveries were erratic so we bit the bullet and did most of it in-house.
The easy part was that we kept all the shootg in tight control as to exposure, lighting ratios, composition, and took great pains the keep the C-41 chemistry and machinery in good control and maintenance so printing was relatively easy and uneventful. I always felt sorry for the color correctors and printers in commercial labs that had to put up with inconsistent shooting, out of format compositions, and poorly processed negatives.

Bill 45

At the end of WWII Germany lose all it patents. Everything was up for the taking.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Kodak's Vericolor Internegative Film was one of the touchier emulsions to work with. At Delmar Studios, for several years in the early 1990s, I ran the class composite production area*. We used miles and miles of Vericolor Internegative sheet film cut from long rolls. It required very long exposures through a thick filter pack, and it had a tendency to shift in color from the time we bought it to the time we used it. It was great when it worked, but our color technicians pulled their hair out trying to keep the entire process stable.

*Composites are prints with thumbnails of all the kids in an elementary school class, or a graduating senior class, fraternity, fire station, etc. Back before digital imaging, we made them by photographing paste-ups of color contact prints onto sheets of internegative film, sandwiching that internegative with a litho film mask, and stripping in a piece of titling film (ortho line film) created on a Linotype Hell Bridgit Laser Imagesetter and a Mac. It all seems quaintly primitive now...

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

You know the drill! The challenges are pretty universal. Yes, our lab was big — 90,000 square feet. When we moved from seven miles down the road in 1988, we put 750+ people in it. Digital processes reduced that to around 200 or less in 2008, and we were doing a lot more volume, having consolidated four labs from Utah and Minnesota.

When I was at Lifetouch, briefly, they had seven labs. I saw two of the others — Burnsville, MN, and Chattanooga, TN. The Burnsville facility was insane. They could churn out almost a million portrait packages a week from that lab. They were bought out by Shutterfly a few years later, and by then, had closed the Charlotte lab. I spent most of 1988 to 2012 in that building. I still have a video of the ground-breaking for it. Now it's a storage locker facility...