Pathécolor

Pathécolor was a film technology developed by Pathé that used a stenciling process to apply color to films frame by frame. This method involved cutting a stencil for each desired color and then applying the color through the stencil at high speeds. While effective for short films, hand-coloring was not cost-effective for longer features. As films grew in length and production became industrialized, mechanized tinting and toning processes replaced frame-by-frame stenciling. Tinting colored the light areas of a black-and-white print, while toning colored the dark areas. These techniques produced monochrome images, with the color chosen to match the mood or setting of a scene. By the early 1920s, colored sequences were common in American films, but the practice was temporarily abandoned after 1927 when it was discovered that tinting and toning interfered with optical sound transmission, paving the way for new color photography systems.1