Printing in Color Part 2: Strange Photographs

The image at the top of this post contains photos made using Dufaycolor film, and Finlay Color film. The two images were printed on the front and back of the same piece of paper, which means they were most likely printed on the same press with the same inks. If this is so, then all of the differences in light and feel of the images were caused by the differences in the two films used.

In the early years of the twentieth century, producing a good color photo was tricky. One process popular in the 1930s and 40s, Carbro color, required “more than eighty different steps” to process (Sipley, 101). Kodachrome color, which went on the market in 1938, (Pollack, 511) resulted in violent oranges. Anseco Color film was blue-green, and Ektachrome film produced weak, orangish reds (Sipley, 164).
To print in four colors, the full range of light bouncing off of an object has to be divided. For instance, you need only the magenta part of the spectrum to be printed on the plate being inked in magenta. Before widespread use of the computer in the printing industry, the way to achieve three color negatives for cyan, magenta and yellow plates, was to photograph whatever you were printing through filters. Shooting through a blue filter would give you a negative to print the yellows, green filter would produce a negative for the magenta, the red filter for the cyan (Benson, 190).

One would think that shooting separation negatives directly from the subject would create less distortion of color than using an already distorted photograph as the starting point. But most separations were made from a flat original, because setting up people and still lifes in front of the camera presented its own problems. It only worked if the people did not move at all while the photographer was changing out the plates and filters for each separation negative. Also, because light had to get through a filter, and sometimes a half-tone screen, good negatives required a lot of light. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Colorplate Engraving Company of New York City made its separations on the roof (Sipley, 41). Even if the photographers could get three solid, correct separations for the cyan, magenta, and yellow inks, how much information to leave in the black layer, was left to the discretion of the cameraman and the printer (Hymes, 50). This might account for how dark some early photo-engravings seem.

If the separations came out dark, or greenish, printers could alter the separation negatives by hand, or use plastic transparencies called Colatones (Sipley, 191). Hand alterations could not have the delicacy of digital alterations. In the image just above and at right, the model’s dress in the masked image looks like it has dropped out of an entirely different world than the rest of the photo.

I would love to read a book on how to identify the film used in a printed photo just by looking at it. If anyone knows of one, please let me know.

I have larger versions of these images and the images from my earlier post on printing in color on Flickr here.

•  Benson, Richard.”The Printed Picture.” New York : Museum of Modern  Art :Distributed by Distributed Art Publishers, c2008.
•  Hymes, David G. “Production in Advertising”. New York: Colton Press   Inc., 1950.
•  Pollack, Peter, “The Picture History of Photography.” New York:   Harry  N. Abrams Inc., 1958.
•  Sipley, Louis. “A Half Century of Color” . New York: Macmillan, 1951.

Printing in Color

The color printing in old periodicals looks different from the printing in modern magazines. High end works from the thirties, such as the prints in Westvaco or Gebrauchsgraphik, contain greens and purples that glow. The ads in Life magazine from the forties show greyish hams and bright pink complections. A large proportion of the ads in magazines before the 1970’s include only one color if they include color at all.

What changes accounted for the differences in printed color images in the first half of the twentieth century? The simple answer is that printed images were produced using different printing methods, inks and originals. The complex answer is a maze of chemical interactions, color theory and economics. In this short post I will touch on only the subject of the inks used. A later post will cover the photographs in early commercial color printing. For a more in depth look at the printing industry, I recommend Louis Walton Sipley’s “A Half Century of Color”.

Inks

Since the 1970s, most magazines have been printed on offset lithographic web-presses. A roll of paper is run through a set of four to six sets of ink rollers. Each roller set includes a flexible metal plate, a rubber “blanket” which picks up the ink from the plate, and the paper which picks up the ink from the blanket (Benson, 256). The inks are quickly dried before passing on to the next set of rollers. The four colors of ink used in these sets of ink rollers are usually cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Occasionally, a high end client will ask for a fifth or sixth color, called a “spot color” if they can’t get the wealth of hues they need out of the normal CMYK inks. Because the “spot color” is a custom job, it can be very expensive.

I want to emphasize that with the web press set up, any page that requires any color, passes through four sets of rollers, whether it needs four colors or not. Moreover, to produce one ad that does not use the standard CMYK color scheme would require wiping down the ink rollers and adding a different set of inks to the rollers, a process that would take time and money. Under such circumstances, the overwhelming majority of ads in magazines these days are printed in CMYK.

CMYK did not always have such a hold on the color printing system. As late as 1927, it was believed that adding two printing inks over each other in rapid succession would necessarily distort an image (Sipley, 67). Each color page was run through the press as many times as there were inks that needed to be added. By 1951, two color presses were common and cheap (Sipley 129). This still meant that if you wanted color, your ad had to be individually run through the press once for two colors, and twice for four colors. If you had to pay to add some color ink to three rollers anyway, why not use the pink, orange and blue ink that would make your image really stand out?

Partly because of the prevalence of two color presses, using only two colors of ink was very common, especially in specialized magazines which would reach a smaller audience. (Biggs, 73). In 1956, because the plate for each ink was hand altered, fewer colors meant less cost (Biggs, 82). Good designers turned the limitation to their advantage, creating some bold and minimal designs.

 

Fun images of color printing:

Women from 1930’s Japan

George Eastman House color prints by Nickolas Muray

Works Cited:

Benson, Richard. “The Printed Picture.” New York : Museum of Modern Art, c2008.

Biggs, Ernest. “Colour in Advertising”. New York: Studio Publications Inc., 1956.

Hymes, David G. “Production in Advertising”. New York: Colton Press Inc., 1950.

Pollack, Peter, “The Picture History of Photography.” New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1958.