Do you wish the world were more like an old postcard? Then you will want to visit Father Pitt’s new Two-Color World, a silly photographic experiment in which every picture is presented in old-fashioned two-color printing, like an old postcard or a two-strip Technicolor movie from 1929.
0 responses to “Two-Color World”
Sorry, Father Pitt, could not tell the difference and I saw more than two colors. What I did notice was the very large size that the pictures went to when clicked upon.
We call it “two colors” because the various colors are made by combining two colors (as greenish and a reddish base). That is how two-strip Technicolor works (“strip” referring to strips of film, each of which captures a different color), which was the way color movies were made until the 1930s. Three-strip Technicolor, which is what you’re familiar with in movies like The Wizard of Oz or Gone with the Wind, uses three colors, and that is enough to combine into “natural color”—meaning all the colors your eyes can distinguish. Similarly, three colors in printing (cyan, magenta, and yellow) are enough to give us all the colors of the visible spectrum.
Two-color printing or photography was a kind of cheat that saved money at the expense of losing some of the spectrum. For example, in those two-color pictures, you will not see any yellow or purple; those colors simply can’t be made by combining red and greenish. Those two particular colors were chosen because they combine to give fairly good renditions of flesh tones (for nearly all colors of human flesh), which was the most important thing in movies. You can forgive any other color deficiencies as long as the actors don’t look like monsters.
And now, just for you, here is the first feature film ever made in (two-strip) Technicolor: The Toll of the Sea, from 1922.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6rjFuHYZWA