<P> The first motion pictures were photographed using a simple homogeneous photographic emulsion that yielded a black - and - white image--that is, an image in shades of gray, ranging from black to white, corresponding to the luminous intensity of each point on the photographed subject . Light, shade, form and movement were captured, but not color . </P> <P> With color motion picture film, information about the color of the light at each image point is also captured . This is done by analyzing the visible spectrum of color into several regions (normally three, commonly referred to by their dominant colors: red, green and blue) and recording each region separately . </P> <P> Current color films do this with three layers of differently color - sensitive photographic emulsion coated on one strip of film base . Early processes used color filters to photograph the color components as completely separate images (e.g., three - strip Technicolor) or adjacent microscopic image fragments (e.g., Dufaycolor) in a one - layer black - and - white emulsion . </P> <P> Each photographed color component, initially just a colorless record of the luminous intensities in the part of the spectrum that it captured, is processed to produce a transparent dye image in the color complementary to the color of the light that it recorded . The superimposed dye images combine to synthesize the original colors by the subtractive color method . In some early color processes (e.g., Kinemacolor), the component images remained in black - and - white form and were projected through color filters to synthesize the original colors by the additive color method . </P>

When did movies change from black and white to color