Tinting and Toning: A Tone Alone Leaves the Highlights Clear

On the back of Kodak’s Tints sheet, sample 8 is green from edge to edge, brightest band included. On the Tones sheet, what appears to be the same shot is filed as Tone G, and there the bright band stays close to white. That is the difference in one picture. A tint colors everything on the strip, while a tone colors the picture and leaves the highlights clear.

Both sheets are bound into Tinting and Toning of Eastman Positive Motion Picture Film, the second edition of a handbook Eastman Kodak Company published in 1918. In its words, coloring film this way was “becoming more common.” Its first paragraph draws the line. Toning replaces “the silver image of the positive film by some colored compound,” with the highlights “remaining unaffected and colorless.” Tinting colors the gelatin itself, “causing the whole picture on the screen to have a veil of color over it.”

Tinting vs toning: what each one colors

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A positive print holds its picture as a black-and-white silver image in a layer of gelatin, the clear jelly that coats the film. Where the silver is thick, the screen shows shadow. Where there is none, Kodak says the highlights consist “of plain gelatine.”

Tinting puts dye into that gelatin, so the color lies over shadows and highlights alike. Toning works on the silver instead. Kodak names the colored compounds it relied on: iron ferrocyanide is blue, copper ferrocyanide is red, and uranium ferrocyanide is reddish brown. Part II of the handbook sums up the result: “while the highlights are clear, the shadows are colored.”

A tint also costs the picture some punch. Kodak says only “good snappy positive film” could be tinted well, “since tinting tends to reduce contrast.”

Kodak adds one overlap. A delicate tint warms the black silver too, and tint No. 11 “gives the effect of a blue-black tone.” So the test is where the color sits on the strip. Look at the highlights.

To tell the two apart on a frame, the handbook’s definitions give three things to check:

1. Find the brightest part of the frame, such as a sky, a white dress or a lamp. If it carries color, that points to a tint, perhaps over a tone.
2. Look at the shadows. If they carry a color while the bright parts stay clear, that points to a tone.
3. If the bright parts carry one color and the shadows another, it may be both: toned first, then tinted.

Each check only reads the strip you are holding or the scan you are viewing. Fading, a later copy or a restoration can change the answer, as the last section of this page explains.

Kodak’s 1918 list: 12 tints and 14 tones

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Kodak built all twelve sample tints from six standard dyes: Cine Red, Cine Scarlet, Cine Orange, Cine Yellow, Cine Green and Cine Blue. The preface says the sample tints were “curtailed to twelve,” and the handbook calls its formulas “merely for guidance.” By this site’s count, nine of the twelve use a single dye. Tints 7, 9 and 12 mix two.

The preface explains why the dyes had changed. Foreign dyes had become hard to get, so this edition switched to American dyes from the National Aniline & Chemical Company. Blue was the weak spot: Kodak admitted it had no “thoroughly satisfactory blue dye,” because film tinted with Cine Blue came out “too red.”

Kodak kept strong tints for exceptions. It calls them “very undesirable” except in special cases “such as fire scenes, sunset and moonlight effects, and the like.” For general use it recommends delicate tints “ranging through pink, rose, orange, yellow, pale green and pale blue.” It also warns that any tint with Cine Blue looks much redder by lamp light than by daylight.

The tones run from A to N. By this site’s reading of the formulas, the first nine use metal compounds or sulphide. The last five sit under the book’s heading New Tones and use dye toning, where a copper tone holds a dye on the image “while the highlights consisting of clear gelatine remain colorless.”

Whole lengths of film were worked in tanks, on racks or small drums, kept apart from developing. Kodak wanted tanks of slate or other resistive material and racks of wood, because a metal peg or pin “will gather the tone in preference to the film.”

Illustration

Download the Kodak 1918 tints and tones table (CSV) · source and license notes

Toned, then tinted: moonlight on water

The two methods could share one strip. Kodak writes that a tint laid over a tone makes the highlights “assume the color of the dye,” while the shadows show a blend of dye and tone. It names one use above the others: “The most successful combination of toning with tinting is in the production of sunset and moonlight effects over water, by first toning blue and then tinting orange, red or yellow.”

The 1918 Tinted and Toned sheet carries that pairing. Tone H, the blue iron tone, appears there with Tints 2, 6 and 8. Tint 2 is made with Cine Red and Tint 6 with Cine Yellow, the red and yellow of Kodak’s advice. Tone N goes a step further: Kodak calls it a double tone, “the shadows appearing dark blue and the half-tones reddish brown.”

The page above uses the same words, double tones, on a later sample page. Its Commons file page dates it to 1927, from the uploader’s entry. Sample 53 shows a harbor with a bright disk low in the sky, and its light runs across the water. The text it points to, pages 35 and 36, is not in the photograph, so this page does not say how sample 53 was made.

The heading names the film base: nitrate. A reel that might be nitrate belongs with a film archive, not on a projector, in a dye bath or on a scanner at home, as Held to the light notes.

What the color on a surviving copy can prove

Seen side by side, the two samples make the point from the opening. Tint No. 8 is green even in its brightest band. Tone G keeps that band pale, with color only in the darker parts. These are century-old samples in a 502-pixel scan.

So their color now shows what this copy of the book looks like, not the color of 1918.

Kodak itself warned about judging by eye. Some toned film, it wrote, looks “colored in the hand” but gives “a substantially black and white image on projection.” It also wrote that toning “is inadvisable” for film that has to be stored for long periods. A pale tone on an old print may be what is left, not what was made.

The same limit applies to any silent film you watch today: the color is the color in this copy. A restoration may have tinted a film again from records or from a guess. So a page here speaks of the original color only when a collection record or a study of the versions supports it.

Machine colorization goes further and paints a predicted color over the evidence in the copy. Frames from The Great Train Robbery on this site come from one named copy, and nothing in them is claimed for the film as a whole.

The word tint has an older meaning on photographs. In an 1872 manual on the ferrotype, the tintype, Edward M. Estabrooke wrote that ordinarily “only the cheeks and lips are tinted,” with dry color on a soft brush. That is color by hand, closer to hand-colored photographs and to what Kodak called local tinting, applied “by hand with a brush, or by stencilling” (p. 29).