Colour movies on black-and-white film? That was the magic of Kodacolor.

Introduced in the 1920s, Kodacolor was the earliest color film processes for home movies. The black-and-white film featured tiny lenses, or lenticules, embossed on its surface. When used with a special red-green-blue filter on the camera, these lenticules separated the light into RGB components, recording color information as vertical stripes in the black-and-white emulsion. During projection, the process was reversed, reconstructing the full-color image. Ingenious for its time, Kodacolor marked a bold step toward making color film accessible to the public.

Lenticular Colour Reconstruction (doLCE 2.0) tool extracts the embedded color information, bringing these rare historical color films back to life and preserving them for future generations.

Credits

Giorgio Trumpy (NTNU), Saptarshi Neil Sinha (Fraunhofer IGD)