To act as background to my own colour negative printing experiences, this web page summarises the evolution of home colour negative printing in the UK since 1950.

Before the 1950s, colour printing mostly required the accurate registration of multiple single colour images in order to build up the final full colour result, and necessitated even more dedicated effort than the procedures that evolved post-1950. The history of colour photography has been thoroughly documented by various authors e.g: 'Colour Photography - The first hundred years 1840-1940', by Brian Coe, published by Ash & Grant, 1978, ISBN 0904069249. That book, or similar, should be consulted for the earliest processes.

The buttons below acts as an Index to this web page. Click on the buttons to go to relevant sections or read the whole as a single text.

One method of achieving home produced colour prints has been possible to artistic amateurs ever since monochrome printing was originated by Fox Talbot using his Calotype process. This is hand colouring. My own parents, as was common in the 1940s and 1950s, 'played' at this method of producing colour prints and allowed us children to also try (though we mostly ruined otherwise perfectly good monochrome prints).

Brian Coe, in his excellent book referenced above, says "From 1843, at (William Henry Fox) Talbot's photographic establishment at Reading, and from the London studio in Regent Street, his assistant Nicholas Hennemann sold rather crudely coloured Calotype prints... He charged 3/6d (17.5p) for prints which sold for less than half that in the original monochrome form."

Even in 1920, despite many early colour photography processes having already been marketed, a professional photographer (C.H.Claudy) writing in 'Camera' observed that "the very easiest way to get a photograph in colours is to make a good (monochrome) one on plain paper and take it to an artist to decorate with brush and pigment." This remained the general rule, at least in Britain, until the 1950s.

The illustrated 'Kodak Soluble Crayon Outfit for Tinting Photographs' has a leaflet entitled 'Charm of Colour - How to Hand-Colour your Snapshots - a new and fascinating method'.

It was reprinted in 1934 from the 'Kodak Magazine', 3d monthly (3s/6d annual subscription, or by post 4s/6d; 17.5p & 22.5p).

It's interesting to note that postage for each issue in 1934 cost only 1d, less than 0.5p !

Alongside is another hand colouring kit for monochrome photographs, this one by Johnsons of Hendon "for colouring postcards, prints and lantern slides".

Johnsons sold such kits from the 1950s and into (at least) the early 1960s. This one is the 'Small' kit containing 9 bottles of photo tint, brown, blue, flesh, crimson, yellow, violet, green, scarlet & orange. It cost 5/- in 1950 rising to 7/6d by 1962 (25p to 37.5p). Thanks to Alan Doyle for letting me use his picture here.

Even as late as 1966 the BJPA carried an advertisement by Winsor & Newton (Harrow, Middlesex, UK) for photo-tinting outfits. Their No.3 cost 30/- (£1.50p), while individual tubes of transparent colours (15 available) cost 1/2d each (10p).

Apart from water soluble crayons (top) and pots of coloured inks (above), the Kodak Velox outfit shown alongside is yet another form of photographic colouring outfit. The colours are in the form of impregnated paper, which Kodak calls Transparent Water Colour Stamps or Leaves. A small section (a stamp) can be torn off the full Leaf and its colour dissolved instantly in a teaspoonful of clean water.

All the colours are readily intermixed to give almost any colour or shade. "These colours are specially prepared for tinting photographic contact prints, enlargements, lantern slides and display transparencies."

The leaflet that accompanies the Velox kit suggests it dates from 1953, though Brian Coe (see top paragraph) refers to similar Velox water colour 'stamps' being popular as early as the 1930s. The price (probably in 1953) was 6s/6d (33p).

The skill was to apply the colour thinly and to use concentrated colour very sparingly only to high-light small details. But, when done with experience and care, hand coloured prints could look quite effective, though a little surrealistic!

Click here to view a set of London images dating from around 1950. Colouring monochrome prints continued into the mid-1960s, even after mass-produced colour prints became available, since the latter were expensive and of unreliable quality until the 1970s.

A 1951 Focal Press book entitled "Photography at School & College" by M K Kidd, advised school leavers with an artistic talent to try colouring photographs. "...skilful and artistic workers are very few and far between. Disregard photographic purists who look down on this work - the public likes it and is willing to pay well." Hopefully these same school leavers found other rewarding employment when 'true' colour printing finally took over within their working life time.

Both Agfacolor & Kodacolor have claims to being the first colour negative film in the world. The AP Classic Camera Supplement for 1989, says: "Agfa produced the first multi-layer colour negative-positive films in Germany in 1936, but at first used them mostly for the production of motion pictures. Eastman Kodak launched Kodacolor in the US in 1942. This was the first colour negative film intended for use in amateur's roll film cameras, but it was some years later before Kodacolor was made available in 35mm form. Because of the war, Kodacolor was not sold in the UK until 1957."

The first amateur colour negative film to be imported into the UK was Agfacolor negative-positive, introduced in 1951. By August 1951 (in a 'Photography' magazine advert), Wallace Heaton of New Bond St, London, announce "The new Agfa color (sic) film has become available in this country. It is a film which is developed to a colour negative from which colour-contact prints, enlargements and b&w prints can be made. It is produced in type 'T' for Daylight and 'K' for artificial light use." The 1952 BJPA says 15ASA for both 'T' and 'K' types, whereas 'Photography' magazine for July 1953 says 12DIN, 12ASA. Agfacolor negative film processing could only be undertaken after an instruction course at an approved Agfacolor School, effectively ruling out amateur processing.

Gevacolor reversal and negative-positive films were first imported into the UK in 1953. The BJPA for 1953 carries a Gevaert advert which shows Gevacolor Negative film and printing paper to be available in the UK. The editorial describes a daylight and an artificial light version, available in roll, cut and 35mm film formats, both with a speed of 16ASA. By 1957 Gevacolor is available as type N5-26 for daylight, available in roll film, 35mm and sheet film formats, and N3-24 for artificial light, but only in sheet form. The number following the N5 apparently refers to the °Sch film speed, meaning that the daylight version was 25ASA. Gevacolor paper and chemicals were also available but the negative film was not intended for amateur processing at that time.

By 1957 Agfacolor CN17 was available at 32ASA. In 1959 Agfacolor had been extended to CN14 at 20ASA and CN17 at 40ASA. Kodacolor (32ASA) was initially (1957) only available in the UK in roll film and 828 sizes, but became available in 35mm by mid-1959. In 1957 Pakolor Super 40 (40ASA) was available in both roll film and 35mm sizes. Ilford's Ilfacolor 32ASA negative roll film became available in 1960 and Ilfocolor 35mm in 1963.

To cater for the more wealthy amateur photography enthusiasts, a new magazine, 'Colour Photography', appeared at the start of 1959, price 2s/6d (12½p - compare this to the physically larger 'Amateur Phographer' magazine, which cost half as much). Although originally intended as a quarterly magazine, by Issue 2 its popularity had uprated it to bi-monthly. By 1962 it was published monthly.

In 1951 Agfacolor film cost 19/8d for a 120 or 620 roll film, 16/9d for a 12 exp 35mm Karat cartridge and 33/5d for a 36exp cartridge to fit Leica, Contax, Retina etc. (98p, 84p & £1.67p respectively). Developing cost 6/- for roll films and the Karat cartridge, and 7/- for the 36exp 35mm (30p & 38p). Direct contact 'proof' prints from 35mm cost 5/- for 12exp, and 12/6 for up to 36exp. (25p & 63p). Roll film contact prints up to 3¼"x2¼" cost 3/6d each (18p).

Colour enlargements cost 6/- for 4¼"x3¼", postcard size cost 7/6d and 6½"x4¾" cost 10/6d (30p, 38p & 53p). There were larger sizes up to 10"x8", the latter costing 28/6d (£1.43p).

Hence, to buy and have developed and printed to the smallest enlargement size, a complete 36exp 35mm film would have cost (then) £12.85p, equivalent to £250 in 2004 money ! More likely users opted for having the contact strip made and then selected suitable negatives for enlarging, but to get just colour contact prints would still have cost £50 in today's money (film, develop and print). With the typical labouring wage being £8 per week in 1951, colour prints were definitely only for the wealthy and, with their variable colour quality, even those who could afford colour preferred to stay with the higher quality, and much cheaper, transparencies (or even hand coloured b&w).

Equivalent monochrome prices in 1952 were perhaps 3/6d (17p) to buy a 36exp 35mm film, a similar price for developing and then 6"x4" prints cost about 6d each (2.5p). Hence, to purchase a 35mm film and have it commercially processed to en-prints would have cost £1.25p, some £25 at today's monetary value. This is still expensive, so again the option of 35mm contact prints, at 0.5p per frame, was on offer, bringing down the total, without enlargements, to 10/- (50p) or £10 at current value. But an ordinary working class person, anxious to record weddings and birthdays with their simple box camera, would have used roll film and been satisfied with the resulting reasonably sized contact prints. A film would have cost around 3/- (15p) and d&p costs would have been around 5/- (25p), a total of perhaps £7 in current money.

At the National Media Museum, Bradford, one exhibit suggests that, in 1952, only one picture in 100 was exposed on colour film. By the end of the 1950s, one in five was in colour.

The BJPA for 1958 carries an interesting editorial entitled "Has Colour Arrived?" The question is debated whether the average 'man in the street' could yet load his (simple £5, not a £2 box) camera with colour print film and get finished prints at a price and quality likely to satisfy. The typical 1958 price of a b&w enprint was taken as 6d (2½p) while colour enprints cost a minimum of 2s.6d (12½p) and mostly 5s (25p). The authors thought it necessary for the costs of a colour enprint to fall to around 1s.6d (7½p) before colour would become competitive. The operating margin for the chemists and photo-finisher was thought to have sufficient 'slack' to enable the cost to fall, but at the expense of colour accuracy, due to the photo-finishers carrying out fewer tests and placing more reliance upon blind automation. The authors considered that the cost-conscious mass market would put price before colour accuracy and so the increased use of automation would eventually, albeit not in 1958, drive down prices to a level this market would find acceptable. The authors deplored the low colour standards which might ensue, though what they naturally failed to foresee was the application (over the next 25 years) of the sophisticated integrated circuit electronics that would eventually deliver mass produced colour prints at a quality and price unimaginable to the authors in 1958.

Even in 1964, commercially produced colour prints still cost 4 to 5 times as much as monochrome and the price to have a 36exp colour negative film developed and en-printed was near the same 'face' value as today, 40 years later, i.e. something over £3. But converting the 1964 cost into 2004 monetary values means it would have cost more like £40 today! For comparison, a black & white user might have paid 4/- for his roll of film. Developing with 8 en prints would have cost around 4/-, or 5/6d for 12 enprints (20p & 28p), making the total d&p cost some £3 to £4 in 2004 money.

The graph alongside, showing the relative cost of colour prints versus black & white from commercial processors catering for the amateur market, was produced while researching the Gratispool story.

It includes the cost of the respective film and its processing. From a starting factor of about 13 times as costly as black & white, the cost of colour prints declined to only about 1.5 times the cost of black & white by the end of the 1970s. At that time, black & white processing was no longer widely advertised, though the service remained available.

By the early 1980s, laboratories advertising to process b&w films became numerous again, but with a changed emphasis. Processors were treating b&w as a 'new' art form rather than a cheap alternative to colour. The introduction of chromogenic film (XP1) by Ilford in 1980 may have helped this trend. The result is that, although a straight comparison between colour and b&w still shows colour to be slightly more expensive, specialist b&w processing (especially the chromogenic C41 colour negative process) became more expensive than mass produced colour printing.

As a corollary to the above, in Camera Weekly for Feb.1987 in the 'Comment' column, Bob Hall, Managing Director of the London International Group, encompassing Colocare & sharing Boots d&p business with Kodak, members of the Association of Photographic Laboratories, claimed nearly 33,000 colour films were being processed per day in the UK! He mentioned 400 mini-labs being in operation around the UK, 90 in Boots branches alone. He emphasised the low cost of colour d&p by comparing it to the cost of putting petrol into a car's tank, viz. 20 years previous (early 1967) colour film d&p cost the same as putting 18 gallons (82litres) of petrol in the tank whereas in 1987 it cost the same as only 2 gallons (9 litres).

In mid-2007, with petrol costing over 90p per litre (say £4.30p per gallon), a typical colour film d&p now costs only 1 gallon of petrol.

In the UK, by the mid-1950s, there were three processes on the market by which the amateur could take advantage of colour negative films and produce colour prints at home. The chemicals and materials were manufactured by Pakolor, Raycolor and Synthacolor. For more information on these early UK colour processes, click the links below.

The first to be available was (it seems) Synthacolor, which announced a home developing and printing outfit in September 1953 (ref: Photography magazine, September 1953). Pakolor followed in February 1955 (ref: PhotoGuide Magazine, February 1955), though commercial developing and printing of its Pakolor negative film had been available since 1952. The date when Raycolor offered its home processing kits is unknown, but certainly by 1955 (ref: BJPA 1956 review, p223). Pakolor differed from Synthacolor and Raycolor by also offering its own colour negative film, whereas Synthacolor and Raycolor assumed colour negatives would be available for printing from either Agfacolor, Pakolor or (by then) Gevacolor films. Raycolor eventually brought out a colour negative film in 1959, though they had marketed a colour reversal film, with a home processing kit, from 1955.

Despite the initial success of these three companies in bringing home colour printing to an eager UK market, they faded from main stream colour printing over the next decade, though the originators of Pakolor (Photo Chemical Co.Ltd) sought US backing and improved their product under a new company name, Pavelle (UK) Ltd. They were responsible for the Paterson-Pavelle home colour printing system, announced in 1962. This process, with further improvement, survived until around 1970. Pavelle was eventually sold and became Durst (UK) Ltd.

Raycolor survived supplying alternative lower cost colour chemistry plus other chemicals, materials & accessories. In 1968 (ref: AP Readers Write, 20th Nov68), Raycolor Universal was available at 6s.6d (33p) a litre as an alternative print developer to the Paterson-Pavelle process. The Paterson P200 chemistry was priced at 11s.6d (58p) a litre. Raycolor were still advertising colour chemistry and other colour printing equipment in AP during the 1970s (Ash Road, Aldershot, Hampshire) and into the early 1990s (199, King Street, Hoyland, Barnsley, S74 9LJ). Their name also appeared as Rayco Instruments Ltd at Aldershot, Hants (in 1986) supplying sophisticated process timers and power stabilisers. If anyone has information on what happened to Synthacolor, I would be delighted to hear from you.

Arguably the downfall of these UK based colour processes was the arrival of Kodak's Kodacolor negative film into the UK (October 1957) followed by the availability of Kodak's semi-automatic printing equipment, chemicals and paper, supplied to the UK photofinishing trade in October 1959 (though Pakolor did try to compete with similar equipment). No doubt the financial & technological R&D muscle of Kodak and the West German Agfa & Gevaert organisations, outpaced the three small UK companies, making their eventual relegation inevitable.

In 1959 (and still in Dec 1960), 'Blackadder' of 11-13 West Nile Street, Glasgow, C.1 advertised their 'Goodman Colour Tank' for "full colour print processing in room light conditions ~ economical with chemicals" for 49/6d (£2 47.5p). Also, a book "Making and Printing Colour Negatives" by John Vickers was on sale at 30/- (£1.50p) from Fountain Press (200 pages and 8 pages of colour plates)

A reader of 'Colour Photography' magazine, No 4 (of 6) for 1960 wrote an article on his own experiences, making mention of John Vicker's book. He comments "So far as I know, only...two makers will supply amateurs with the paper. Perhaps there is some apprehension on the part of other makers that premature use by all and sundry will lead to disappointment, as they seem at present to confine themselves to the skilled experts or to those who will undergo courses of instruction open only to professional users." Another contemporary 'Colour Photography' reader wrote a 'diy' colour printing article at the end of 1960 entitled 'Colour Prints .. at the kitchen sink'. He used Kodacolor negatives and Ektacolor paper, but complained about the poor support from Kodak for amateur use of their processing kit - large quantities and short shelf-life. But he overcame all problems and concluded by saying "the revolution of colour photography is here, right now. Anyone who says this isn't so is holding out on you." Another reader, in the 'Correspondence' column, said "What is really necessary for colour printing, however, is plenty of patience."

"Good Photography" magazine, in the autumn of 1961, ran a monthly series of articles entitled "COLOUR printing" written by Peter Hunter, based upon his experiences with Kodacolor negatives and Ektacolor paper. Mr Hunter quoted almost £6 (upwards of £100 in 2007 values) for a 'whole' set of 'subtractive' printing filters, against 'only 8s.3d' (41p) for a set of tri-colour 'additive' filters. Nonetheless, Mr Hunter advocated the subtractive method because it permits 'shading and burning in' as in black & white enlarging 'and at least 90% of professionals use it'. He also said that he found the tri-colour method harder to use and gave him greater difficulty in assessing his (test?) results.

In 'Colour Photography' magazine for January 1962, reader R.Powley encourages amateurs frustrated at the difficulty of buying small quantities of colour paper and chemicals for home use, to try Raycolor materials. He wrote that (around) 1958 he contacted "almost everyone likely to help an amateur to obtain supplies of colouir printing materials. The only people (he) found were Raycolor Ltd." They provided, directly or via dealers, inexpensive kits of processing chemicals to make 1000cc of each solution and also small 10 sheet packs of paper from 2½"x3½" to 10"x8". He noted that Raycolor also provided small sheets of reversal paper and necessary chemicals to make prints direct from transparencies. Over the intervening years (from 1958 to the time of his letter) Mr Powley conceded that Kodak, Ilford and Agfa had all made chemicals and paper available to amateurs, but their minimum paper size was 10"x8" (10 sheet packs from Kodak & Ilford; 100 sheet packs from Agfa). Also, their appropriate processing chemicals were available in minimum 1gallon (4,500cc) volumes. Mr Powley went on to report good experiences of storing Raycolor solutions "almost indefinitely if stored in the dark in tightly stoppered glass bottles." He believed Gevaert paper and chemicals would become available to amateurs "some time in the future", but this was not by early 1962.

But things were about to change !

This system included their Johnson 35mm Colour enlarger (£34.6s = £34.30p) but only with a colour filter drawer, not a dichroic variable filter head, a voltage stabiliser (£10.9s.3d =£10.46p), a Johnson Colour Negative Assessor (£36.12s.4d = £36.62p) and the Johnson Colour Processing Tank Set (£7) consisting of 7 plastic tanks (for the Ektacolor process), each taking 1 litre of solution, a washing tank and a Print Carrier, the latter working on the 'toast rack' principle. Temperature control of the tanks required standing them in a sink of warm water.

The Johnson Photographic Year Book for 1965 admits "It would be wrong to claim that this equipment solves all the problems of colour printing - or that it gives perfect prints from any negative. No equipment, however complex and costly, can do that. It does, however, avoid much of the waste and drudgery of what can be a rewarding and fascinating process. It gives a high proportion of acceptable 'first time' prints and makes correction for slight deviations a much easier task."

But relatively few amateurs took up the option to make their own colour prints and it never became as popular as black & white home processing had been in the 1950s and 60s. There was no cost economy in printing one's own colour negatives, in reality it was more expensive and VERY time consuming - a commodity in apparently ever shorter supply as the century progressed and people commuted through time consuming traffic jams to and from work. Meals were no longer prepared and ready on the table when the man of the house returned from work. Now, both marriage partners were working. Tending the house & children became shared activities which made eventual relaxation in front of the TV a more inviting prospect than disappearing into a DARK (but see below) colour darkroom. Enthusiastic amateurs continued to take colour slides, while the quality and price of commercially produced colour prints were mostly acceptable to the remainder.

Only the occasional person appreciated the challenge and potential rewards of colour printing - though I was no doubt lured by the manufacturers optimistic marketing claims for their processes. Read on for how I made out !

I didn't develop my own films. I reasoned that High Street d&p en prints were good value and I would have the benefit of professionally processed negatives as well as prints that would serve as a basis to judge my results. I developed the occasional film but never found it really worthwhile.

Why do home colour printing?
While most en prints were OK, some were a bit light, others dark and some had a discernible colour cast. I wanted to have control over the end result, especially those photographs which were well exposed, sharply focussed and well composed. I wanted to be able to do duplicates, selective enlarging and exercise control like 'burning in' and 'holding back' areas of the print.

By early 1982 I'd equipped myself with a Durst CM50 color analyser in an attempt to speed up achieving good results, but the procedure remained slow and uncertain. By the time a negative was analysed, test strips exposed, processed, washed, dried and considered, plus the drum dried and made ready for the next print, 45mins could elapse. And that still left the final print to be made which wasn't guaranteed to be perfect due to the difficulty of assessing the colour balance and density of test strips.

A whole evening could go by without anything to show for my efforts. You might think that with an analyser I might not need to do test strips. Not so! It was rare for a negative to produce a perfect print with exactly the filtration advised by the CM50. What the analyser did was to give me a filtration and exposure time which was close to ideal, but a 'ring around' test strip was still needed to fine tune the colour balance. Of most concern was that, even at my best, I wasn't matching the clean whites and colour contrast of professional prints.

In an effort to improve print quality nearer to professional standards I tried different paper and processing chemistries. This, of course, meant frequent reprogramming of the analyser for each new paper and chemistry combination. To assist this procedure I collected several 'test negatives' that integrated to a true grey (as required by the CM50), but still there was much wasted time and materials. I tried not to count the cost - it was my hobby! During the first 12 months I tried:

• Kodak Ektacolor 78RC paper with Paterson Acucolor chemistry
• Kodak Ektacolor with Kodak's own Ektaprint 2 chemistry
• Agfa paper and Infocol chemistry
• Ektacolor paper with Photocolor II
• Agfacolor Type 4 paper with Tetenal PA chemicals
• Agfacolor paper with Agfa Process 85 chemicals

But still I didn't feel I was obtaining the clean whites and colour saturation / contrast of d&p en prints. Whatever was wrong, they lacked the shear impact and 'sparkle' of the professional result.

A review of the new Kodak colour printing process called 'Ektaflex' appeared in Amateur Photographer for February 6th 1982. This dye diffusion system promised to be simpler than conventional processing. With my disappointment during the preceding 12 months I decided to give it a try and spent around £80 on a system (with materials) in early October 1982.

The simplification was that processing time and temperature (18-27°C) were no longer critical and only one long lasting solution (the alkaline Activator) was required. But colour filtration and exposure time were as critical as ever and there was now a new process step, lamination of the exposed 'negative film' onto the final print paper. Lamination was achieved via the 'Printmaker' unit, an operation which (virtually) prevented the making of test strips smaller than a full 10"x8" sheet. Bearing in mind that processing a conventional 10"x8" sheet of paper cost about 60p at that time, while a similar result from the Ektaflex cost up to 3x as much, it wasn't ideal to use full size sheets of paper for test prints!

I used my Ektaflex processor for the next 3 months but couldn't escape its short-comings. It was costly to use, lamination wasn't always perfect so materials got wasted; making small test strips wasn't easy and the end quality couldn't match conventional printing.

I don't think Ektaflex stayed on the market for more than about 5 years (?) so it seems I wasn't the only one disappointed. By the end of 1982 I was back into conventional colour printing, trying Photocolor Paper and Chemicals. Ektaflex featured several times further in my experiments up to the middle of 1984, by virtue of the print materials becoming heavily discounted. I took advantage of these offers, but without real satisfaction and eventually I sold my Ektaflex to a work colleague and returned to 'conventional' colour print processes.

To simplify the use of elevated temperature processing I experimented with putting the Thermodrum water bath onto a large thermostatically controlled dish warmer and by autumn 1985 was testing yet another combination of paper and chemistry, this time Agfa Type 8 paper with Type 92 chemistry.

The major break-through came in May 1983 when I tried the newly introduced Photocolor RT (Room Temperature) chemistry (subsequently called Printmaster) from Photo Technology Ltd. This avoided the need for temperature control and so improved consistency of results. Importantly, it also gave beautifully clean whites, something which I'd struggled to obtain previously, though comparative experiments made me suspect my use of a stop bath between developer and bleach fix was the primary cause and thereafter I stopped using one.

During the latter 1970s and throughout the 1980s, an excellent series of home colour processing Photocolor products emanated from Photo Technology Ltd of Potters Bar, Herts. This was a company formed by Adrian Willis and 'Pip' Pippard in 1975 which resurrected the photo-chemical products abandoned by Johnsons of Hendon in 1974.

'Pip' Pippard, ex-Technical Director for Johnsons of Hendon, obtained rights to the Johnsons of Hendon 'scales brand' logo, the familiar yellow and orange colour scheme and the famous Johnsons brand names such as Definol etc, but Hestair (owners of Johnsons at that time) would not sell the company name 'Johnsons of Hendon'. Hence, 'Pip' Pippard and Adrian Willis settled on the name of PhotoTechnology Ltd and set up operation at Cranbourne Industrial Estate, Potters Bar, Hertfordshire.

Photocolor II film and print developer (for Ektacolor Type 37RC or Agfa Type 4 papers at that time) appeared around mid-1975 (AP did a review in their 17th September issue). With the speed of its emergence after Photo Technology was formed, Photocolor II must (?) have been based upon some colour chemistry already under development. The clue may be an article in 'Photography' magazine for May 1973 which refers to Johnsons having "recently introduced an easy-to-use outfit to suit Agfa paper and formulated for the small-scale home user."

Photo Technology also sold the monochrome chemicals that used to be sold by Johnsons i.e. Definol, Unitol, Bromide, Universol. Contrast, 326, Indicol, Fix-Sol, Redifix and Speedwash. In 1976, they are manufacturing Johnsons' 'Definol' developer and advertising that 4p is all it cost to develop a 35mm b&w film.

A Photo Technology Definol advert in mid-1977 bears the original Johnsons of Hendon labelling.

By the end of 1976, Photo Technology were also selling Photochrome R, for making prints from slides by direct reversal of Ektachrome 14RC paper.

By 1979 they added their Photocolor Chrome-Six E6 colour slide processing kit to the Photocolor range. Originally just as a 1 litre kit, by early 1982 Photo Technology also marketed a 4 litre version, capable of processing the equivalent of 40 36-exposure 35mm films. It cost £26.93p + VAT, working out at about 77p per film.

The Johnsons 'scales' remained on the packaging to the end of the 1990s, after which Photo Technology lost their separate identity within the Paterson Group. But identifiable product names remained e.g Printmaster RA, where RA reflects the move to the RA-4 process from the previous EP-2. RA stands for 'Rapid Access' due to the speed of processing. The RA process seems to have first appeared, initially in parallel with the previous EP-2, around 1991. The first Photo Technology chemistry for RA-4 was Photocolor FP, marketed from early 1992. For a fuller history of Photo Technology Ltd read here.

The only problem that remained for me after taking up Photocolor (RT) Printmaster room temperature chemistry was obtaining the same print contrast possible with higher temperature chemistry. This I substantially resolved by simply increasing the development time, first by 10% and then by 20%. The +10% results were appreciably better, richer blacks and brighter colours, but +20% had little further benefit.

With Agfa Type 8 paper, the extra development required modified colour filtration:

• +10% required +2Yellow and -5Magenta over normal development
• +20% required +4Yellow and -5Magenta over the normal development

The final stage in standardising my colour printing was a change from the Paterson Thermodrum to the Paterson Orbital 'tray type' processor with its motorised agitation base. The Orbital Print Processor was first marketed by Paterson Products Ltd in 1982.

Since RT chemistry didn't need a surrounding water bath to control processing temperature, the Orbital tray was less 'messy' and had the additional advantage of only needing 55ml of 'one shot' chemistry rather than 75ml in the Thermodrum. I also found drying the tray for the next print easier than drying the Thermodrum. I sold my Thermodrum and managed to buy the Orbital processor and motorised base secondhand.

By 1987 I had a semi-permanent darkroom in a spare bedroom and continued to try different papers viz: Agfa Type 8, 3M & Ektacolor Type F, but always with the Photocolor RT Printmaster chemistry. The RT chemistry was 'improved' twice during this time, allowing shorter development times.

I finally stopped colour printing in November 1991 after some 10 years and (by coincidence) around the time the RA4 process appeared (early 1991 ?). In late 1992, Tetenal and Fuji both announced that their RA-4 papers would be available in 10"x8" 25 sheet boxes, rather than only being available in 'professional' 100 sheet boxes (as was always the case up to the last Fujicolor EP-2, being Type 03).

The two negative / positive printing paper systems, EP-2 and RA-4, co-existed for several years. Agfa announced at the start of 1993 its intention to continue supporting the previous EP-2 process, with its own Agfacolor Type 8 paper and Process 92 chemicals, throughout that year and even as late as 1995, Agfa, Fuji and Tetenal continued to offer EP-2 paper and chemistry. At that time, Tetenal released a new RA-4 paper called 'Work' (distinctive packaging shown left) which Photo Pro magazine praised as behaving "a little like an EP2 emulsion", in comparison to the reviewer's opening general criticism of RA-4 being "a thorn in many sides. Compared to EP-2 the colours still tend to be brash, the contrast high and generally the paper is difficult to grade to exact colours". By 1996, Tetenal seem to have dropped EP-2 altogether.

I regret never having tried RA-4 but doubt I ever will now that digital printing has become a real alternative. It has to be admitted that (with my technique and basic equipment set up) home colour negative printing was never a real option for more than making occasional prints. With digital inkjet output quality at a stage where its hard to tell the difference between ink and silver based prints, digital wins every time. But colour darkroom was fun (most of the time !) and I found reward in overcoming the challenges.