jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

When I was a kid, shooting eight pictures on a roll of 127 in my Kodak Brownie, I brought my film to the local candy store. It took a few days to get the pictures back. B&W was fairly inexpensive, but color pics were pricey, as was the film. Eventyally, we got 24-hour developing. Then it went to just one hour.

Peteso Loc: Blacks Hills

Back then I was shooting professionally, often in color. Having a color darkroom was an expensive proposition and didn’t make sense to me. Also, color processing was formulaic and not very interesting or creative like black-and-white processing. Professional custom labs were very common and some were specialized. For example, I used different labs for wedding and school pictures. Then I used a different lab for large prints, although that was the most expensive processing, so I did that selectively. For the best results and negative storage, I sometimes had 35mm and medium format negatives transferred to 4 x 5 sheet negatives. Hope this helps…

47greyfox Loc: on the edge of the Colorado front range

Excellent! You just help move that kid’s dream real. Bravo Zulu!

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

As a multi-image AV producer at Delmar Studios and Delmar Yearbooks in the early to mid-1980s, I used thousands of rolls of Ektachrome and Fujichrome slide films, processing them myself in an E6 sink line with a temperature control unit and nitrogen burst agitation. Slides required precise exposure, precise color filtration of non-daylight light sources, precise in-camera composition, and offered little to no processing options. Oh, you could push Ektachrome a stop or so, but it usually looked awful!

I DO NOT miss those days! E6 was a precisely controlled process. Chemicals were monitored with statistical process control charts that graphed density plots from control strips read on a densitometer. Replenishment was measured to the milliliter. Developer, reversal bath, wash, color developer, bleach, fixer, final wash, and stabilizer temperatures were controlled to ± 0.5°F. Film loading (20 Nikor reels at a time, into a six-tube stainless steel open basket used in the dip-and-dunk tanks) was done in TOTAL darkness, as were each of the first four steps in the seven-step sink process. From loading 20 reels to dry film ready to cut and mount took at least two hours, because I had to manage the chemicals (dry the control strip, slap it on the densitometer, read the patches, plot the three colors on the graph, evaluate results, calculate replenishment rates, and toss replenishers into each tank!). Then, of course, we had to cut and mount the slides, and clean the film (and the four glass surfaces of each mount when we used glass mounts for final projection).

Was it worth the hassle? At the time, it was. Multi-image was the art of simultaneous projection of multiple slide images in synchronization with a soundtrack. We used two to 15 slide projectors, programmed by computer. The shows were used to open and close our sales meetings and yearbook editor/advisor summer workshops, and as "customer education" tools.

Later, I worked in many different roles in our school portrait lab. We printed in many different ways. In the optical days, we had three giant PAKO processors that ran up to three strands of 10" paper at 32' per minute per strand. We had another PAKO we used for black-and-white (a crappy way to process black-and-white, but the applications were school IDs, file folder prints, rotary card file cards...).

We had over 30 custom-built, multiple lens deck, automatic portrait package printers. They cost $127,000 each to build in the 1970s and '80s, and probably each had $100,000 worth of upgrades and add-ons by the time they were recycled in the early 2000s. These had built-in darkroom shrouds to enclose an operator as she changed a 550-foot roll of 5", 8", or 10" paper, placing the exposed paper in a dark bag for processing.

We also had six somewhat similar Kodak S printers that we used for single exposure printing from carded, masked negatives (from 70mm, through every 120/220 format, to 35mm).

Then we had a couple of home-built printers that had multiple, removable lens decks to print packages from sports and groups portraits.

Beyond that, we had a printer dedicated to 16x20 prints from 120 roll film or carded/masked negatives, a 10"x10" enlarger for printing 8x10 sheet film, four APAC contact printers used to make classroom composites, a few hand enlargers used for making custom sizes up to 20x24...

Yeah. We had LOTS of tech... in 1980, it was a $20 million a year business. We mixed chemicals in 1100 gallon drums. We bought tractor trailer truck loads of paper in mile-long, 40" wide master rolls, and slit it down to various sizes of rolls and sheets to use in our custom printers.

Optical printing was, in principle, simple. We used 3200K quartz-halogen lamp houses with dichroic color filters that slid in and out of the light path. The printer operator set density, red, green, and blue values on the lamp house, based on color analyzer data produced by a quality control department. The printer projected this light through color negatives onto paper. The printer was equipped with a computer that pulled editing data from our server. This told the printer, "Automatically advance to frame 313 and make one 8x10, two 5x7s, and 16 jumbo wallet prints" (or whatever the order called for).

In our lab, there was almost no dodging or burning! We produced machine prints for the mass portrait market. If you were a smart pro, you sent true custom work to a different lab.

Herff Jones bought Delmar in 1996. In the late 1990s, we experimented with digital imaging, making low resolution scans from 100' rolls of portrait film, and then printing very small items on low resolution Kodak printers. By 2001, we were using Kodak Bremson high resolution film scanners to scan long roll film, and Noritsu digital mini-labs to print portrait packages. In 2005, our 330 retail photographers began using Canon EOS 20D cameras for portraiture. Our wholesale customers followed their lead, soon after.

We ripped out seven different film processors, nine $50,000 scanners, and the C-41 1100 gallon mixing tanks and plumbing in 2007. At that point, everything was digital. We had to PAY to recycle all that equipment!

I can't stress enough just *how* revolutionary the digital revolution was! In our film era of the business, we often had orders to make seven different products from a 100' roll of 46mm portrait film. This meant that film had to be routed to seven different printers, sequentially! It got dirty and scratched along the way. We tried to make the portrait packages first, then color "service items," then B&W "service items." Still, Film Cleaning was a department!

Once we were fully digital, the images were on a central server, and could be printed simultaneously on different devices such as Noritsu mini-labs, Epson wide format printers, Fargo and Pebble plastic ID card printers, Konica color copiers with Fiery RIPs, our NexPress, or burned to CDs. That drastically shortened turnaround times from as long as a month (for seven product jobs) to less than a week!

In the film days, retouching zits off senior high school students' faces was done on Adams Retouching Machines, using 8X magnifiers, 000 camels' hair brushes, and special liquid dyes. It was an art and a skill, difficult because we were retouching NEGATIVES. Retouchers had to mix dyes opposite the colors they would print. Once digital imaging was in place, we used Photoshop on PCs, along with Kodak Professional AUTOMATIC Retouching Software. Retouching finally made some real money!

In the last year of our existence as Herff Jones (before Lifetouch bought us), we had a COMPLETELY computerized process. Our "Shutterware" software captured and edited images and subject/package data at the camera. Our automated school agreement package configuration system fed job data to the lab. Images and data came in on DVDs and were copied straight to the servers. The lab became an "output device".

Alas, before that happened, the market had started to deteriorate. A confluence of the Internet, digital imaging, social media with image sharing sites, mobile phones, tablets, and computers, just ripped up our business model and trashed it.

We were sold to Lifetouch (13 times bigger than HJ Photography) in 2011. Lifetouch became part of Shutterfly a few years later. Two ESOP school portrait companies were no longer ESOPs. I left in 2012, rolled over my shares to an IRA, and moved on.

The school portrait industry is still around, but it's a shadow of its former self. Its demise had a lot to do with Kodak's demise, too, as the school portrait companies used a HUGE chunk of Kodak professional films, papers, and chemistry volumes. We were "deprecated by a paradigm shift." It was great — until it wasn't!

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

What everyone is saying. And there are books about the history and practise of photography. Let your fingers explore your local Library and / or Book Shop. I've used pretty much every sort of film or paper type since 1976 to 1996. Cibachrome included. The chemistry to all these sorts of films and papers will make your head spin.

Papa Joe Loc: Midwest U.S.

Raquez, it wasn't quite that easy!
Color print processing was extremely 'experimental' at first. Temperature was a very important factor. We spent long nights just making 'test strips' for one print, only to find out the following night, that same info didn't work well. It was tedious and expensive but such fin! So rewarding, when you finally ended up with a successful color print!
God Bless,
Papa Joe

bvogel Loc: Evergreen, CO

Your enlarger needed to have a color head with the CMY filters. These filters also helped when using multi-grade black and white papers.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

As an aside to my earlier essay:

Chemicals used for color processing are notoriously dangerous. Wear eye protection and rubber or nitrile gloves when mixing/handling them. If they don't give you contact dermatitis, then sooner or later, they might lead to cancer. Both of our long-term film processing people developed similar cancers. Both occasionally had put their bare arms in the deep tanks of the processors, attempting to save film during power failures.

Without some sort of color analyzer tool, achieving accurate color balance is difficult. Even then, the nature of chemical processes is that concentrations and temperatures vary, so no two process runs are exactly the same.

Printing color negatives can be done with digital printers. Macro photograph the film. Ideally, use a color correct light source, a film holder that keeps film FLAT, baffles to block all stray light from around the negative, a macro lens, a digital camera with remote release, and either electronic shutter mode or mirror lock-up, or both. Convert the digital camera raw file in the Negative Lab Pro plug-in for Lightroom Classic. It uses the same basic algorithms used in high end lab scanners. (To print slides, just copy the slide to a raw digital file and process normally in Lightroom Classic/Photoshop, or whatever other software you use.)

Printing the processed image from Lightroom Classic or Photoshop to a wide format Canon or Epson printer can yield phenomenal results, assuming you know what you're doing.

Brucej67 Loc: Cary, NC

For color work I would send the unprocessed film to National Color Lab and they would possess them and send me proofs for my clients who would select what they wanted and I would have NCL process the final print. I did B&W processing in my darkroom, but color was to hard to get right.

robertjerl Loc: Corona, California

I really hope he was a success.

Dan Ellis Loc: St. Louis, Mo

I worked for several years in a professional color lab which did finishing for for wedding and portrait photographers mainly. Every week I processed hundreds of rolls of primarily 120 and 220 Vericolor using a Pako automatic dip and dunk film processor. Than after the process we had to make proofs, usually 4x5 of most of the shots on all that film using kodak 5s and 8s printers. I also was the primary custom printer in that lab making prints all the way up to 30x40 which was the largest our Kreonite paper processor would handle. Printing color negatives is easy with the automation doing the processing for you. And after printing thousands of prints on a color enlarger an the kodak printers, color correction became almost automatic for me. After leaving that job in 1980 and going into the wedding photography business alone I continued custom printing my own work for many more years until digital became good enough. I wound up donating my 16 inch Kreonite processor to a college and giving all the lab equipment away. I miss it in some ways but not much. By the way all during the years I worked at the pro lab I also shot about 100 weddings a year for the studio owner who owned the lab. I did that for 8 years and working at the lab for 4 to 5 years. The good old days.

Tote1940 Loc: Dallas

It was not easy to print color in chemical photography
My experience: In B&W no problems, enlarged, dodged and burned up to 11x14 fun and fast
Color Negative : took a course at Virginia Western Community College and learned to fight Kodak machine very well described in another posting. Total darkness, cannot touch surface . fingerprints , fighting wet mesh that did not hold paper well etc etc Confirmed my strong dislike for color negative, some OK prints but not worth the effort.
Then came Cibachrome (later called ilfochrome) direct print from slide to paper, at room temperature .
Had (still have unused) small enlarger with filter drawer have (still) set of Spiratone gelatin filters.
Much easier , very nice snappy contrasty prints that still look great have not faded.
Learned that could use a green filter over Kodak light so not completely dark.
Developed in Spiratone drum rolled on table .Load in dark (just green light) but roll and change fluids in lighted room.
Fairly long process, in one step corrosive liquid must be drained into bicarbonate to neutralize before flushing to drain.
Then you get perfectionist , re print with some adjustment of exposure, even dodging/burning in although some color shift with it. Play around with filter pack. Two or three decent prints in one evening.
Cibachrome was fun but much prefer now ink jet printer!!
Still have gear, no longer have a very nice darkroom such as I build in those days.
No printing color was not easy!! Much better to send out but unless expensive custom job you could do better at home from slide to Cibachrome.
Happy I used mostly slide film back then; negatives are more difficult to get color right when scanning.
An old timer

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

Yes, I watched it. Interesting but I've done color printing but glad I don't need to do it myself.

Dennis833 Loc: Australia

When I was a shooting wedding and portraits I printed every image I sold in my own darkroom. I had a Chromega 4x5 enlarger and a Hope 16" color processor. It took 10 minutes to process a 16 x 20" print from dry to dry.

ialvarez50

I been teaching photography for many years and yes, back then if you had a darkroom you could print from both negatives and slide film (positive images). If you printed your own color film, you could do dodging, burning or change contrast. I am not sure if Ilford or other company's still have the chemistry available, chances are that they do not. But B&W printing is still possible and there is an absolute pleasure for me to teach that at Truman College in Chicago.