Conversation:

"The primary colours - red, blue, and yellow - are used, one to a negative, to produce the full range of colours."

Not true. Those are the primary colours of inks, not light. With inks, you get Green by mixing Blue and Yellow, while with light you get Yellow by mixing Red and Green.

The primary colours of light are Red, Green and Blue, and those are the colours used in producing full-colour movie film.

As an aside, in the early days of "colour" movies, a simpler, cheaper two-colour process was used which just had a choice of Red or Cyan. This was known as the "Kinemacolor" process, and was also used by Technicolor from the 1920s to 1930s before the introduction of their superior 3-colour process.

I posted the message about the primary colours error without reading the rest of the paragraph... Sorry for implying you didn't know about the two-colour processes...

Don't worry about it - I'm glad to know you were reading it.

Stephen

So how about the original point - Did three-strip technicolor use Red, Green and Blue (as we would expect today) or Red, Blue and Yellow?

These pages suggest it was Red/Green/Blue:

http://home.att.net/~B-P.TRUSCIO/FILMBASE.htm
http://www.reelclassics.com/Techtalk/technicolor-article.htm

So the page still needs correction.

Excellent article, by the way.

It had to be Red, Green and Blue - with Red, Blue and Yellow it's impossible to portray Green.

Unless it was still an incomplete system like two-strip, which is why I had to check.

I'm happy to make a correction, if one is needed. If so, can somebody let me know which sentence should be changed to what? If you see what I mean

"The primary colours - red, blue, and yellow - are used, one to a negative, to produce the full range of colours."

That line should read "red, blue and green" (the comma after blue is spurious too since it is followed by an "and"... )

Thanks for that - all done now

I'm glad you're all on the ball about this. I'm not a film expert by any means, and found the limited descriptions I could find confusing. Thanks for straightening things out.

Stephen
P.S. Maybe someone should write an entry on color film processes. Sounds like there's a lot to know!