[ continued from: Stripping the Anti-Halation Backing ]
REBIRTH OF DYE TRANSFER Another potentially exciting development in printing technology is the attempted resurrection of Technicolor's dye-transfer printing technique. First utilized with three-strip black-and-white camera negatives, and later adopted for single-strip color negative films, the process hasn't been used in Hollywood since the 1974 release of The Godfather Part II.
With all of the recent advancements in film technology, Technicolor's new focus on the dye-transfer process is intended to improve the revered old system. Some industry experts have adopted a "wait-and-see" attitude toward the firm's goal, but Technicolor's experts remain optimistic. "What we point out to our customers is that dye transfer will give you blacker blacks than standard color positive print film, with more detail and higher color saturation," explains Frank Ricotta. "Additionally, one of the major advantages of dye-transfer printing is that we can alter the contrast of the printing elements that we make. From the original negative, we manufacture printing elements called matrices, which are the complimentary [Y-C-M] records of the blue, red and green imagery recorded on the original negative. If you have an original negative that was shot normally, but want a bit more or less contrast, you can now adjust those levels in the print by utilizing dye-transfer printing."
One boon to Technicolor's efforts is the staggering progress made by Kodak in emulsion technology. "Kodak has essentially made four new stocks for us," Ricotta says. "There are the three different black-and-white matrix stocks for the red, green and blue separations, and then what we call a receiver stock. In the dye-transfer process, we start with the original color negative and then, on an optical printer, separate the red, green and blue information onto these first three stocks, which make up your complimentary color matrices. Then, by virtue of the way you print and develop these matrices, in addition to having a silver image, they have a relief image on them.
"Dye transfer is very much like an offset printing process that has a drum with raised and lowered lettering on it," he continues. "In offset printing, you flood that drum with ink and then print that ink onto a piece of paper. By doing four passes — with cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink — you create a color image. Dye-transfer printing isn't all that different. When the matrices come off the developing machine, they also have a relief image like a printing plate. When these matrices are then loaded on the dye-transfer machine, the three separate records are, in turn, saturated with the appropriate dyes and then sequentially put into contact with a receiver film, onto which the dyes are transferred. Of course, the three dye images must be transferred in perfect registration with one another to avoid color fringing in the print."
An added benefit from printing each color layer separately is the ability to individually select the quality of each dye used. "The dyes in a standard color print film are actually manufactured in the positive film as a result of chemical reactions," Ricotta details. "Those dyes are very good, but they restrict your freedom in terms of what dyes you are going to use because they are formed by the chemicals that are already in the film. With the dye-transfer process, you select the dyes that you want based on their actual color rendition.
"Color positive prints will never look exactly like dye-transfer prints," notes Ricotta. "While we believe the overall quality of dye-transfer prints to be superior, we recognize that the "dye-transfer look' may not be proper for every picture. In that regard, it may considered yet another option in the arsenal of the creative community."
[ continued: Time-Tested Alternatives ]