CMYK
November 9, 2010
OK, so the history of color printing goes back hundreds of years. But today, the most widely recognized palette in use for color printing is CMYK: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key black. Okay, it’s easy to see how those colors, as variations on primary colors, give you lots of different possible results when mixed. But if you think back before the world was pixelated–how exactly did that combination come to be for color photography and film?
A nuclear blast is many times brighter than the sun. But within that initial blast, and the seconds following it, there are many changes in temperature–changes which scientists and engineers found it prudent to record visually (not exactly being able to fly into the cloud and measure outright, you know). In fact, lots of the details of a nuclear detonation had to be studied from a distance, for safety purposes. (This, to me, is the big elephant in the room–if it’s too dangerous to get close enough to understand, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it. But that’s neither here nor there. I am an American and as such I have a piece of responsibility regarding the state of the world today, even if neither I or my parents were even born in ’45.) So the recording of atomic testing was super important, and we threw a lot of money into it, in the first phase of the Cold War. One product which was developed for this process is “extended range” (XR) film. Made up of three layers, the film had a slow layer, a medium layer, and a fast layer. The slowest layer of film was able to record the brightest phenomena.
Now, developing multiple emulsions like this was really, really tricky. Introducing some color into each layer of film made it easier to develop later–made it less dense, made it easier to see the details. “…you can make the arrangement in anything you want. But in XR film” its inventor Charles Wyckoff “happened to make the first layer the most sensitive layer as a yellow image, and the intermediate sensitive layer as a magenta image, and the slowest layer as a cyan image.” Not only did Wyckoff’s employer, Kodak, get a lot out of this, “but “when NASA was getting ready to go to the moon, they had [him] develop a color film for them, for the moon landing, which was really based upon this principle. All of the modern day color films are now based upon this principle.”
There’s no doubt that the idea of combining some basic primary colors to make other ones is an idea that long predates the U.S.’s atomic weapons program. But that CMYK combination that is in your printer today took its cues from “analog” color printing, and that in turn sought inspiration in the photographic techniques developed to record bomb blasts.
(Source: How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb.)
Entry Filed under: Dissertation. Posted in Dissertation .
