The problems of washed-out colors making movie scenes look like gray wastelands isn’t limited to the digital era, if a competition were held then there are plenty from the film-emulsion era that could easily compete for first prize.

In the 1930s a quantum leap in the quality of color film occurred with the introduction of an updated tricolour version of Technicolor. The quality of the colour in Disney films and others such as the Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind (both 1939) was truly exceptional when compared with anything that had preceded it and the color still holds up very well even by today’s standards without any digital tweaking or remastering.

In 1950 rival Kodak introduced its Eastmancolor color negative process which used a single filmstrip with a tricolour emulsion that captured the full color range and by mid 1950s studios had a choice of using Eastmancolor negative in cameras and printing onto either Kodak’s own color theater release stock or to use Technicolor’s dye transfer process for same.

The trouble started with the introduction of Eastmancolor stock because it was far less stable than Technicolor. Technicolor is stable because it used a tri-separation process involving three B&W emulsions—B&W film being inherently very stable—as well as stable dyes in its dye-transfer process (for its theater release prints). As no photographic process is used in the dye transfer process, its dyes can be selected for both stability and vibrancy, whereas Eastmancolor has significant limitations in that its dyes have to be compatible with the photographic process (they use chemical couplers to bind dyes to the photographic process and there’s not that many options available). Moreover, color dyes generated by the coupler process have both a smaller color gamut and, as mentioned, they’re far less stable and fade-prone than Technicolor.

Under ideal conditions Eastmancolor produced good results but QA issues as well as Eastman’s theater release shock faded quickly, deliberately so—as theater release prints were designed only to last one season or to do one round of the circuit—for if film got lost or stolen it would be useless after a year or two (otherwise it was worn out anyway).

Of course, things never went to plan, and all too often faded, badly color-graded and rerun prints long past their use-by date made their way back into theaters and were continued to be used. The net effect was that one would often see Eastmancolor theater release prints that were unacceptable for stated reasons, thus it was not unusual to see significant numbers of movies that suffered from fading, significant exposure and color errors and even cross-color†, which, in my opinion, looks damn horrible even in small amounts. To help minimize these problems theater release prints would often be printed in somewhat desaturated/subdued colors as they were less obvious.

The Viewer’s Problem:

Whether we’re dealing with film or digital source material that needs colour grading/correction then there are very effective solutions are but they're not necessarily accessible to the home consumer (or even to theater projectionists).

What viewers need are TV/screen remote controls, that in addition to their usual functions, would also include optional features that enable the viewer to (a) either colour correct a movie on-the-fly or (b) select color corrections from a set of preprogrammed color terms (color correction matrices) similar to those used in professional photo printing machines (those which use color negatives as their source material).

I’m not just talking about the basics such as the usual saturation, colour balance, contrast and brightness, but also vibrancy, curves, shadow and highlight correction and midtone contrast. In essence, all the necessary tools needed to correct both exposure and color errors in movies similar to, say, those that one finds in Photoshop’s Adjustment menu such as Shadow/Highlight (one of my most favorite and most used adjustments).

If studios do a good job in color grading/correcting their movies then we need do no adjusting. But I find that's rarely the case. What bothers me most, perhaps even more than color adjustments are the all-too-frequent excessive instances of black crushing and loss of detail in the shadows and highlights and I want sophisticated tools to correct them. (Surely, I'm not the only one who's noticed the high contrast and crushed blacks in many of the recent transfers of old films to DVD etc. It's clear no one has even bothered to make any corrections.)

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† Cross-color is color distortion that occurs as the result of a nonlinear transfer process (cross-modulation) and essentially it very difficult to correct or remove because of the newly created intermodulation products (artifacts—new colors that weren't there at the outset). Cross-color in a film emulsion usually occurs when one dye layer bleeds or diffuses into another which then mix to form the new colors. Moreover, the amount of dye diffusion isn't linear across the transfer curve, it may be at maximum or minimum in the shadows or highlights or anywhere along the curve. There are many causes, aged prints, bad processing, bad handling, one dye being more unstable than another and thus it fades more than other layers (color degradation of this type is largely exacerbated by the film emulsion's exposure to projector light.

That said, cross-color effects can be corrected or eliminated in modern digital effects generators, that is if people bother to take the time to do so (and often they don't). Presumably in the near future AI will do the corrections according to some proscribed algorithm.