Kodachrome - WikiHQ

Kodachrome is the brand name for a color reversal film introduced by Eastman Kodak in 1935. It was one of the first successful color materials and was used for both cinematography and still photography. For many years, Kodachrome was widely used for professional color photography, especially for images intended for publication in print media.

Because of its complex processing requirements, the film was initially sold only with the cost of processing; independent photography stores were prohibited from developing Kodachrome. To develop the film, customers had to mail it to Kodak, which would then send the developed film back as part of the purchase price. In 1954, the U.S. Department of Justice found that this practice violated antitrust laws by being uncompetitive. Kodak then entered into a consent decree, requiring the company to offer Kodachrome film for sale without the development fee, as well as license Kodachrome development patents to independent photography stores. Kodak had sold mailers to users who wanted their films to be processed by them. Nonetheless, the process-paid arrangement continued in other markets around the world.

Eventually, the growth and popularity of alternative photographic materials, and, much later, the widespread transition to digital photography, led to Kodachrome's loss of market share. Its manufacture was discontinued in 2009, and processing ended in December 2010. In early 2017, Kodak announced it was investigating the possibility of re-introducing Kodachrome, but later conceded that this was unlikely to happen. More recent professional film photographers such as Steve McCurry, David Alan Harvey, Peter Guttman and Alex Webb also favored the film. It was used by McCurry for his iconic 1984 portrait of Sharbat Gula, Afghan Girl, for National Geographic magazine. These first practical color processes had several disadvantages because they used a Réseau filter made from discrete color elements that were visible upon enlargement. The finished transparencies absorbed between 70% and 80% of light upon projection, requiring very bright projection lamps, especially for large projections. Subtractive color methods avoided these disadvantages.

Rudolf Fischer was granted a patent in 1913 for a proposed color photography process in which three separate emulsions, each sensitive to a different color, would be exposed simultaneously. However, Fischer was unable to implement the idea.

First use of 'Kodachrome' name

The first Kodak product called Kodachrome was invented by John Capstaff in 1913. His Kodachrome was a subtractive process that used only two colours: blue-green and red-orange. It required two glass plate negatives, one made using a panchromatic emulsion and a red filter, the other made using an emulsion insensitive to red light. The two plates could be exposed as a "bipack" (sandwiched emulsion to emulsion, with a very thin red filter layer between), which eliminated the need for multiple exposures or a special color camera. After development, the silver images were bleached out with chemistry that hardened the bleached portions of the gelatin.

Using dyes that were absorbed only by the unhardened gelatin, the negative that recorded the blue and green light was dyed red-orange and the red-exposed negative was dyed blue-green. The result was a pair of positive dye images. The plates were then assembled emulsion to emulsion, producing transparency that was capable of good (for a two-colour process) colour rendition of skin tones in portraits. Capstaff's Kodachrome was made commercially available in 1915. It was also adapted for use as a 35mm motion picture film process. Today, this first version of Kodachrome is nearly forgotten, overshadowed by the next Kodak product bearing the same name Kodachrome.

In 2012 Capstaff's early film tests were added to the United States Library of Congress National Film Registry under the title Two-Color Kodachrome Test Shots No. III (1922) for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant."

Development of modern Kodachrome

The next version of Kodachrome was invented in the early 1930s by two professional musicians, Leopold Godowsky Jr. and Leopold Mannes, who were also university-trained scientists.

Mannes and Godowsky first took an interest in color photography as high school students in 1917, when they saw a movie called Our Navy, a movie production using a four-color additive process. Both agreed the color was terrible. After researching the subject in the library, they started to experiment with additive color processes. Their experiments were continued during their college years, eventually producing a camera having two lenses that projected images side by side on a single strip of film. The color rendition of this additive two-color process was of fair quality, but aligning the two lenses of the projector was difficult.

Their experiments, which continued after they finished college, turned from multiple lenses that produced multiple, differently colored images that had to be combined to form the final transparency, to multiple layered film in which the different color images were already combined and therefore perfectly aligned. Such a multi-layered film had already been invented and patented in 1912 by the German inventor Rudolph Fischer. Each of the three layers in the proposed film would be sensitive to one of the three primary colors, and each of the three layers would have substances (called "color couplers") embedded in them that would form a dye of the required color when combined with the by-products of the developing silver image. When the silver images were bleached away, the three-color dye image would remain. Fischer, however, failed to find a way to stop the color couplers and color sensitizing dyes from wandering from one layer into the other, where they would produce unwanted colors.

Mannes and Godowsky, using a similar approach, started experimenting with color couplers, but their experiments were hindered by a lack of money, supplies and facilities. In 1922 Robert Wood, a friend of Mannes, wrote a letter of introduction for Mannes and Godowsky to Kodak chief scientist Kenneth Mees, referencing their experiments and asking if Mees could let them use the Kodak facilities for a few days. Mees offered to help, and after meeting with Mannes and Godowsky, agreed to supply them with multi-layer emulsions made to their specifications. The pair then secured a $20,000 loan from the New York investment firm Kuhn, Loeb and Company, instigated by a secretary there that Mees had befriended.

By 1924, they patented a two-color process that employed "controlled diffusion". By timing how long it took for an image to form in the top layer ahead of the lower level, they began to probe the prospects of timed processing as a means of controlling wandering dyes. Some three years later they were still experimenting with such a method in a multi-layer emulsion, but by then they had decided that instead of incorporating the color couplers into the emulsion layers themselves, they could be added to the developing chemicals.

When their money ran out in 1929, Mees helped them once more. He knew that the solution to the problem of the wandering dyes had already been found by one of Kodak's scientists, Leslie Brooker, and so fronted Mannes and Godowsky the money to pay off their loan with Kuhn Loeb and offered them a yearly salary, coupled to a three-year deadline to come up with a finished and commercially viable product.

Shortly before their deadline at the end of 1933, Mannes and Godowsky had not produced anything usable, and thought their experiments would be terminated by Kodak. Instead, Mees granted them a one-year extension and, still having technical challenges, they eventually presented Mees with a mere two-color movie process in 1934, just as the original Kodachrome invented by John Capstaff some 20 years earlier.

Mees immediately set things in motion to produce and market this film, but just before Kodak was about to do so in 1935, Mannes and Godowsky completed work on the long-awaited but no longer expected, much better, three-color version. On April 15, 1935, this new film, borrowing the name from Capstaff's process, was formally announced. and the following year it was made available as 8mm movie film, and in 135 and 828 formats for still cameras.

In 1961, Kodak released Kodachrome II with sharper images and faster speeds at 25 ASA. In 1962, Kodachrome-X at ASA 64 was introduced. In 1974, with the transition to the K-14 process, Kodachrome II and Kodachrome-X were replaced by Kodachrome 25 and Kodachrome 64.

In later years, Kodachrome was produced in a wide variety of film formats including 120 and , and in ISO-ASA values ranging from 8 to 200.

Until manufacturing was taken over by rival film manufacturer GAF, View-Master stereo reels used Kodachrome films.

Decline and discontinuation

Later color transparency films, such as Agfachrome, Anscochrome, Fujichrome and Kodak's own Ektachrome used simpler, quicker, and more accessible color development processes. Their higher film speeds also eroded Kodachrome's market share, as the quality of competing films improved over time. As digital photography reduced the demand for all film after 2000, Kodachrome sales further declined. On June 22, 2009, Kodak announced it would no longer manufacture Kodachrome film, citing declining demand. On July 14, 2010, it was announced that the last roll of Kodachrome manufactured had been developed by Dwayne's for photographer Steve McCurry, a National Geographic photographer. McCurry had asked Kodak for the last roll in stock, then went out on his own to use that roll. Although McCurry retains ownership of the slides, prints of the 36 exposures are permanently housed at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York

Characteristics

thumb|upright=1.2|Kodachrome photo taken at the [[1939 New York World's Fair]]

thumb|upright=1.2|Kodachrome photo, President [[Franklin D. Roosevelt, USA, 1944]]

thumb|upright=1.2|Kodachrome photo by Chalmers Butterfield of [[Shaftesbury Avenue from Piccadilly Circus, in the West End of London, England, c. 1949|alt="A busy 1949 city scene in London, England, with black vintage vehicles, red London buses and many pedestrians. Buildings advertise "Wills's Gold Flake Cigarettes" and "Craven A" cigarettes.]]

Emulsion

Kodachrome films are non-substantive. Unlike substantive transparency and negative color films, Kodachrome film does not incorporate dye couplers into the emulsion layers. The dye couplers are added during processing. This means that Kodachrome emulsion layers are thinner and less light is scattered upon exposure, meaning that the film could record an image with more sharpness than substantive films. Transparencies made with non-substantive films have an easily visible relief image on the emulsion side of the film. Kodachrome 64 and 200 can record a dynamic range of about 2.3D or 8 f-stops, as shown in the characteristic curves. Kodachrome 25 transparencies have a dynamic range of around 12 f-stops, or 3.6–3.8D.

Color

The color rendering of Kodachrome films was unique in color photography for several decades after its introduction in the 1930s. Even after the introduction of other successful professional color films, such as Fuji Velvia, some professionals continued to prefer Kodachrome, and maintain that it still has certain advantages over digital. Steve McCurry told Vanity Fair magazine: