Film tinting

Film tinting is the process of adding color to black-and-white film, usually by means of soaking the film in dye and staining the film emulsion. The effect is that all of the light shining through is filtered, so that what would be white light becomes light of some color.

Film toning is the process of replacing the silver particles in the emulsion with colored, silver salts, by means of chemicals. Unlike tinting, toning colored the darkest areas, leaving the white areas largely untouched.

The process began in the 1890s, originally as a copy-guard against film pirates. The film was tinted amber, the color of the safelight on film printers. The discovery of bleaching methods by pirates soon put an end to this. Both the Edison Studios and the Biograph Company began tinting their films for setting moods. Because orthochromatic film stock could not be used in low-light situations, blue became the most popular tint, applied to scenes shot during the day and when projected, signified night.

A variation of film tinting is hand coloring, in which only parts of the image are colored by hand with dyes, sometimes using a stencil cut from a second print of the film to save keep colouring the same piece on different frames. The first hand tinted movie was Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895), from Edison Studios. In it, Annabelle Moore, a young dancer from Broadway, is dressed in white veils that appear to change colors as she dances. Hand coloring was often used in early "trick" and fantasy films from Europe, especially those by Georges Méliès. Méliès experimented with color in his film biography of Joan of Arc (1900), leading to a more spectacular use of color in his 1903 Trip to the Moon, made available to modern viewers only after the 2012 release of a restoration of the film by Lobster Films. The distinctive use of color in VoyagoSome prints of the popular Edison film The Great Train Robbery (1903) had selected hand-colored scenes. Pathé had 100 young women at its factory at Vincennes who were employed as colorists. They produced the Life of Christ in 1910, an example "still" of which is above.

...
Wikipedia