Those who lived outside the USA bought Kodachrome with prepaid envelopes — which you used to get send off to get developed at one of Kodak's specialist labs across the world. The film got sent back to you a week or two later in the mail mounted and packaged in yellow plastic boxes. US photographers also got these mailers up until when the US government ruled that Kodak's monopoly on Kodachrome processing was anti-competitive. Other photofinishing labs were allowed access to the chemistry - and photographers chose which lab they wanted to use and paid separatel.
Nearly all other color transparency film - including Kodak's Ektachrome and Fujfilm's Fujichrome — uses the E6 chemistry process. For photographers, the news piece put out by The Phoblographer on 1 April has to be one of the best April Fools ever. Hot on the heels of the real news that Kodak Ektachrome was making a comeback , the story announced that Kodachrome would be making a comeback too Almost 10 years after the company announced the death of the beloved film emulsion, Kodak is letting the world know that Kodachrome is indeed going to be returning to shelves very soon after Ektachrome hits stores The production of Kodachrome stopped in October , but Kodak had made sure that there were plans to ensure that remaining rolls of the emulsion could be processed after that date.
Kansas-based processing lab Dwayne's Photo continued to offer developing services for the film through to January The final hours of the lab's Kodachrome service are depicted in the Hollywood road movie Kodachrome - in which Ed Harris plays a famous documentary. The last every roll of K64 was famously shot by Magnum photojournalist Steve McCurry - who had used Kodachrome for over 30 years to take many of his most famount images, including the iconic portrait of the Afghan Girl.
Could Kodachrome make a comeback? With the advent and advances in digital photography, film sales plumetted during the early part of the 21st century. Not only did professionals and enthusiasts move over to using digital cameras and re-usable memory cards - but the masses abandonned compact cameras in favor of pocketable multi-function camera phones.
But as more film companies stopped production of different film stocks, silver halide photography has made something of a comeback. Older photographers want to go back to the cameras they learned their craft on - and young photographers want to differentiate themselves by using traditional materials. Which may account for why it has a misleading reputation for crude and garish color. But in fact Kodachrome was remarkably subtle, fine-grained and tonally rich.
It could record both the dainty pastel colors of fabric and skin, and the equally garish colors of the newest pre-war automobiles and displays of neon blanketing a Times Square. Because of its complex processing requirements, the film was sold process-paid in the United States until , when a legal ruling prohibited this.
Elsewhere, this arrangement continued. For many years it was used for professional color photography, especially for images intended for publication in print media. Because of the growth and popularity of alternative photographic materials, its complex processing requirements, and the widespread transition to digital photography, Kodachrome lost its market share.
Hence, manufacturing was discontinued in and its processing ended in December Kodachrome was the first color film that used a subtractive color method to be successfully mass-marketed. Previous materials, such as Autochrome and Dufaycolor, had used the additive screenplate methods. Until its discontinuation, Kodachrome was the oldest surviving brand of color film. Kodachrome is appreciated in the archival and professional market for its dark-storage longevity.
Copies of the film for sale to the public were also produced using Kodachrome. Before Kodachrome film was marketed in , most color photography had been achieved using additive methods and materials such as Autochrome and Dufaycolor, which were the first practical color processes. Using the subtractive method, these disadvantages could be avoided. The first Kodak product called Kodachrome was invented by John Capstaff in His Kodachrome was a subtractive process that used only two colors: 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. After development, the silver images were bleached out with chemistry that hardened the bleached portions of the gelatin. Using dyes which 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 a transparency that was capable of surprisingly good for a two-color process color rendition of skin tones in portraits. It was also adapted for use as a 35 mm motion picture film process. Today, this first version of Kodachrome is nearly forgotten, completely overshadowed by the next Kodak product bearing the name Kodachrome.
The next, and famous, version of Kodachrome was invented in the early s by two professional musicians, Leopold Godowsky, Jr. Mannes and Godowsky first took an interest in color photography when in , still high school pupils at the time. After reading up on 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 project images side by side on a single strip of film.
Their experiments, which continued after they finished college. Such a multi-layered film had already been invented and patented in 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.
When the silver images are bleached away, the three color dye image would remain. Some three years later they were still experimenting using this controlled diffusion method of separating the colors in the 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, solving the problem of wandering color couplers.
In money ran out, and Mees decided to help them once more. So he gave Mannes and Godowsky enough money to pay off the loan Kuhn Loeb had supplied and offered them a yearly salary. He also gave them a three-year deadline to come up with a finished and commercially viable product. Not long before the three-year period would expire, at the end of , Mannes and Godowsky still had not managed to come up with anything usable, and thought their experiments would be terminated by Kodak.
Their only chance for survival was to invent something in a hurry. Something that the company could put into production and capitalise.
Mees, however, granted them a one-year extension. Two-color, it must be noted, as was 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 introduce the two-color film in , Mannes and Godowsky completed work on the long-awaited but no longer expected, much better, three-color version.
Kodachrome was first sold in as 16 mm movie film. Until its manufacturers were taken over by rival film manufacturer GAF, view-master stereo reels used Kodachrome films. Other transparency films, such as Fujifilm Fujichrome and Kodak Ektachrome use the simpler, quicker, and more accessible E-6 process. As digital photography reduced the demand for all film after , Kodachrome sales further declined.
On June 22, , Kodak announced it would no longer manufacture Kodachrome film and cited declining demand. It wasn't easy being green. Or yellow or red or blue, for that matter. It also ends a legacy that includes some of the most enduring images of 20th century America. Disappointed by the poor quality of a "color" movie they saw in , the two Leopolds spent years perfecting their technique, which Kodak first utilized in in mm movie film.
While all color films have dyes printed directly onto the film stock, Kodachrome's dye isn't added until the development process. Steinle says that although all dyes will fade over time, if Kodachrome is stored properly it can be good for up to years. The film's archival abilities, coupled with its comparative ease of use, made it the dominant film for both professionals and amateurs for most of the 20th century.
Kodachrome captured a color version of the Hindenburg's fireball explosion in It accompanied Edmund Hillary to the top of Mount Everest in
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