For many years color printing was difficult to achieve; however, through technical advances in

light-sensitive materials, chemicals, and printing equipment, color printing is as flexible and practical as black-and-white printing. The primary interest to you, as a Navy Photographer's Mate, is to produce color prints with an acceptable color reproduction of the original scene.

Good color prints are not difficult to make. Anyone who has normal color vision and can apply the principles of color theory can quickly learn to make good color prints.

NEGATIVE TO POSITIVE PROCESS

Like all negative materials, the images recorded on color negative films are completely reversed from the original scene as follows:

Darker hues are recorded as lighter hues;

Red is recorded as cyan;

Green is recorded as magenta; and

Blue is recorded as yellow.

To record the image as it appeared in the original scene, you must print the color negative onto a second tripack material-the color printing paper. If you need to refresh your memory on the characteristics of color printing paper, refer to chapter 2.

The theory of color printing is simple when you think through the stages of color reproduction. Since the colors reproduced in the color negative are complementary to the original subject colors, a red car is cyan in the negative. Cyan is a combination of blue and green; therefore, the two emulsion layers in the paper that are sensitive to blue and green are affected when the negative is printed. Then during print processing, yellow dye forms in the exposed portion of the blue sensitive layer of the paper, and magenta dye forms in the exposed portion of the green sensitive layer of the paper. Yellow and magenta in combination produce red; therefore, the red car is reproduced in its original color. All the other colors form in the same way.