Origins

Ilford and Cibachrome

Cibachrome becomes Ilfochrome

Photograph: Owen Boyd

 

Early origins

Surprisingly the idea of producing images by selectively bleaching a dyed layer goes back further than the now conventional colour coupler method.

In 1910 a paper called Utocolor was produced by Dr J.H.Smith in Zurich.

This used the direct bleaching action of light on dye layers - a difficult process to control, and the material was not hugely successful.

By 1918 J.H. Christensen had patented a method of bleaching the dye layers with a sodium hydrosulphite / catalyst bath.

This idea was developed further by Béla Gaspar who in 1933 introduced Gasparcolor, a dye destruction colour movie film.

All these processes produced relatively stable images, but all of them suffered from low effective emulsion speed.

However while high sensitivity to light is needed for taking photographs, printing is not so demanding.

Back to Top

 

Ilford and Cibachrome

Before the days of Cibachrome, in 1953, Ilford launched a colour print material based on dye bleach technology.

Owen Boyd in 1953

This material was continued until 1963, when Ilford amalgamated with Ciba-Geigy Photochemie of Switzerland, who were at that time producing their own dye bleach material marketed as Cilchrome.

Cilchrome became Cibachrome, and Ilford in conjunction with Ciba-Geigy, continuously improved the material.

By the mid 1970's Cibachrome had become the industry standard for high permanence richly saturated prints from transparencies.

The "Cibachrome red" in particular was famous for its intensity - blues were somewhat less stunning.

The deluxe material introduced in the late 1970's redressed this balance, and the current "mirror gloss" paper gives superb deep blues.

Back to Top

 

Contrast control

Early Cibachrome was a very high contrast material, fiendishly difficult to work with, nearly always requiring "dodging" or "Burning" to render highlights and shadow areas adequately.

Many printers used contrast masks - very thin low contrast black and white negatives bound in contact with the transparency, in order that "local" contrast could be maintained without compromising the dynamic range of the print.

There are now three contrast grades of Cibachrome, and the whole thing has become a lot less fraught!

Back to Top