Moving Images, Understanding Media

144 Moving Images: Making Movies, Understanding Media

Color photography originates from the principles that are observed in

the functions of human eyesight and the properties of the color spectrum. As

they experimented with color photography, scientists understood that the full

range of colors in the spectrum could be duplicated through combinations

of red, green, and blue or their opposites, cyan, magenta, and yellow.

Technicolor and the Three-Strip System

Films in the fi rst decades of the cinema used hand tinting of frames or dyeing

of sections of the roll, including the Edison company’s Annabella’s Dance,

Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, and many features of the 1920s that used tints

for particular scenes, whether red for fi re or blue for moonlight.

Red Green Blue

Cyan Magenta Yellow

Figure 4-26 Illustration image that shows the colors separated into the

three primary hues of red, green, and blue. With the Technicolor system,

there would have been three negatives of cyan, magenta, and yellow

that would combine in the positive print to produce a full-color image.

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