page_title: Edward Raymond Turner
section_title: Lee–Turner colour process
hierarchical_section_title: Edward Raymond Turner / Lee–Turner colour process
caption_attribution_description: Image from the National Media Museum Collection. Following a transfer of the collection from the Science Museum to the National Media Museum in 2009, two rolls of film were discovered. Curator of Cinematography, Michael Harvey, identified them as being original Lee and Turner film and organised initial tests to see if the colour information could be recovered. Initially we took three frames of film, coloured them red, green and blue and superimposed them in Photoshop. The resulting image, in full colour, was stunning. This led to us considering restoring the whole roll of film in this manner. This was undertaken by archive experts David Cleveland and Brian Pritchard using a combination of traditional laboratory techniques and digital technology. They followed Turner’s method exactly and were able to reveal the full-colour moving images. They can now be seen for the first time in 110 years in the Museum alongside the original equipment used by Turner. We're happy for you to share this digital image within the spirit of The Commons. Certain restrictions on high quality reproductions of the original physical version of apply though; if you're unsure please visit the National Media Museum website. For obtaining reproductions of selected images please go to the Science and Society Picture Library.
context_page_description: Edward Raymond Turner was a pioneering British inventor and cinematographer. He produced the earliest known colour motion picture film footage.
context_section_description: Turner is noted for his attempts to develop what is believed to be the first actually implemented colour motion picture system, initially with financial backing from Frederick Marshall Lee, then later from Charles Urban.
  On 22 March 1899, while Turner was employed in the London workshop of colour photography pioneer Frederic E. Ives, Turner and Lee applied for a British patent on a 3-colour additive motion picture process. It was granted on 3 March 1900. In September 1902, Urban bought out Lee's interest and continued funding research and development.
  Turner's camera used a rotating disk of three colour filters to photograph colour separations on one roll of black-and-white film. A red, green or blue-filtered image was recorded on each successive frame of film. The finished film print was projected, three frames at a time, through the corresponding colour filters.
  The system suffered from two types of colour registration problems. 
  First, because the three frames had not been photographed at the same time, rapidly moving objects in the scene did not match up on the screen and appeared as a blurred jumble of false colours.
  Second, and apparently much worse, mechanical instabilities in the system caused serious overall registration problems, so that the three superimposed images ceaselessly jittered and wove about relative to each other.
  When Turner died in 1903, Urban passed on the development of the process to George Albert Smith in the hope of creating a commercially viable process. Smith however found the process unworkable, and instead developed Kinemacolor, a greatly simplified two-colour version that enjoyed a moderate commercial success for several years.
caption: Still from footage recorded by Edward Turner in 1902
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "2763", "Image ImageLength": "5556", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image ImageDescription": "1983-5236_12367_2, 27/01/2009, 15:09,  8C, 5556x2885 (1374+4698), 150%, Custom,   1/8 s, R21.0, G1.4, B7.7", "Image Make": "Better Light", "Image Model": "Model Super6k", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2009:01:29 10:12:19", "Image ExifOffset": "428", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "654", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4088", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/8", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "100", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "3", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2414", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1795", "EXIF SensingMethod": "Trilinear"}