Timeline of Historical Colors in Photography and Film

The timeline offers sorting by year, colour system or inventor, plus categories such as hand colouring, tinting, toning and screen processes. Its search field accepts process: and inventor: modifiers. Open a process through Access detailed information to move from the summary to its technical explanation and associated material.

The Technicolor No. IV page, for example, explains how three black-and-white records were used to make a colour print by transferring dyes. It connects that mechanism with film galleries, archive credits and photomicrographs, which show a sample under magnification. These details help separate the production method from a general impression of an old film’s colours.

Process pages include references to original papers and later writing, and some provide downloadable papers. The project was founded and curated by Barbara Flueckiger and developed through University of Zurich film-colour projects.

The stated database licence is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0. It permits sharing licensed material for non-commercial purposes with attribution and the required notices, but does not permit sharing adaptations. Individual archive images and reproduced documents still need their own rights check before reuse.