Do color photos fade more than B/W?

Factual Questions
1

I heard someone saying recently that “[Some person] said to take some photos of your kids in B/W, since color can fade over time.”

I know that light exposure can cause anything to fade over time, so the questions:

Do B/W photos hold up better to UV exposure than color?

Without a lot of UV exposure over time, does color just spontaneously fade–and if so, why? I know that a lot of films that have presumably been in cans for many years are often referred to as being remastered. What’s the deal?

(This is not an issue for me, as I’ve always shot both color and B/W–just looking for some factual info.)

2

Actually, I believe that monochrome (silver nitrate) film is the most stable for long-term storage, and that the best way to preserve a colour photograph is to take three monochrome pictures through separate colour-filters, so that the colour photograph can be reassembled from the monochrome prints.

Isn’t this how Technicolor worked?

3

In a BW photo, you have only 1 color to fade, so it is automatically fading at a uniform rate. Thus an old BW photo looks faded out, but is still recognizable.

In a color photo, the colors usually fade at different rates. Thus in an old color photo, most of the yellow, for example, may have faded out, but the other colors might have faded much less. So it appears to change colors as it fades. This is quite a bit more distracting to people than a BW photo fading to lighter grays.

4

Color photo fading and preservation

5

In some B&W photographs and negatives no dyes are used. The black is developed silver nitrate crystalls. The light sensitive nature of the silver nitrate is no longer active after developing. I am guessing that the developing process takes a silver salt and oxidizes it. Some B&W films use color dyes and processing.

Until a chemist comes along - In color photography a dye is developed during the processing. The dye component is attached to the silver nitrate and during developing a dye will be chemically formed. These dyes are prone to fading. WAG - UV radiation breaks bonds in the dyes.

Ilford has a product line called Ilfochrome, that uses Azo dyes. These are extremely stable and long lasting. These dyes are not formed in the developing process but are somehow attached to the exposed silver nitrate. Azo dyes are two benzene rings attached by N=N bond with some little thingies hanging off the rings. WAG - UV radiation has a harder time breaking these bonds.

Summarizing - Regular color photographs uses a dye that is formed during developing and is prone to fading. Ilfochrome uses a stable dye that is introduced during the developing process. Noncolor B&W film has a stable silver compound (or other metal like gold or platinum) that is not light sensitive

Some of the fading and discoloration in older photographs is due to inadequate developing, fixing, and washing. Other is due to the paper. RC paper and non rag paper will yellow and deteriorate similiar to old newspapers. The film base is gelatin - like the stuff Bill Cosby hawked - which can go bad like other organic product. The older films had a cellulose base that was prone to disintigration or worse.

6

I’m in the process of scanning every picture in my mom’s photo albums. Everything - old family photos from 120 years ago, her wedding photos, my baby pictures, my sisters’ photos…I’m thinking I can preserve these pictures because I’m predicting they’ll either be one day lost, burned, thrown out, divided amongst family, etc.

Call me crazy becuase I know it’s just 1s and 0s and you can’t really fade that, but some of the earliest pictures I’ve scanned or taken with a digital camera look crappy. These are pictures I’ve copied from computer to CD to computer about 3 or 4 times. Now do they look bad because they were taken on a 1 megapixel camera or crappy scanner from 7 years ago, or am I just used to looking at my beautiful new scans or 4 megapixel pictures now?

Basically I’m asking a similar question - will my digital pictures be preserved indefinitely?

7

In theory, a digital file can be preserved forever just by recopying it before it degrades beyond the point when you can read it. Straight bit-for-bit copies can be made as many times as needed with no loss of data at all.

The (potential) problems are the file format and the storage medium.

Make sure the file format you use doesn’t use any “lossy” compression. JPGs (or JPEGs) are almost always a compressed file format that discards some information that is usually not missed, or not missed much. This gives very good compression on many images, so the storage sizes are smaller. Save a file using a lossy compression format like JPG more than once or twice, and it becomes VERY obvious. Even a single save loses some information, and sometimes a lot of information. These formats should always be avoided for any kind of storage where you want to preserve an image.

Other formats, such as TIF (TIFF), PSD, GIF, etc., are usually not lossy, and should be used for storage.

The second problem with file formats is also the problem with storage devices. Will you be able to read them at a later date?

As fast as the computer industry changes, file formats and storage devices come and go at an alarming rate. I’ve got backup tapes made only 6 or 7 years ago that I can’t restore because the tape drives aren’t made anymore. Optical disks that were widely used 8 or 10 years ago are now just coasters for the same reason. I’ve got gigs of data on Zip disks. Who knows if Zip Drives will still be around 10 years from now? The CD has been around for 20 years or so, but will CD readers still be available in another 20 years?

The same thing can happen with file formats. Use a format that is proprietary to a particular program and you are (more or less) dependant on that program to retrieve it. If that program isn’t available, you’ve probably lost access to that file. I have backup files made on diskette (which are rapidly going away, it seems) that were made with a backup program that no longer exists. That data is essentially gone.

So high quality digital copies can be a great way to preserve data. But make sure that you copy them every now and then to a new storage medium, and use a current loss less file format. In that way, you should be able to keep them more or less forever.

8

It is not actualy silver nitrate. The undeveloped film/paper contains silver halides (AgBr, AgCl etc.) which are light sensitive. During development the silver halide is reduced to metalic silver.

Whilst metallic silver is much more stable than dyes used in color prints, it is still prone to environmental attack either from chemical residue from processing, from the atmosphere or leaching from other materials it is in contact with, such as poor quality mounting card.

Photographers who are interested in the archival qualities of their work (unfortunatly, IMHO, far too often at the expense of the artistic qualities) will ‘tone’ prints with e.g. selenium or gold. This will either convert the silver to a more stable compound (as with selenium) or coat the silver grains with another substance (gold).

RC paper (where the paper is coated with a thin plastic layer before coating with the light sensitive stuff) got a bad press in the early days as it deteriorated quite quickly. Those specific problems have been solved but there are still heated debates as to how archival modern RC papers are - I guess only time will tell.

Interestingly (or not) all color paper is RC except for Ilfochrome where the base is polyester and contains no paper at all.

That would be celluloid

9

Celluloid-based films are actually quite stable, image-wise, as long as they are stored properly. Many “purists” find the look of celluloid-based films to be better - denser blacks and clearer whites. But celluloid film is notoriously (almost explosively) flammable, and therefore has long ago been replaced by “safety” film.

10

Safety film is also celluloid-based: cellulose triacetate. The volatile stuff is nitrocellulose, also known as cellulose nitrate.

11

Color photographs that were preserved by creating color separations on black and white film can look stunning almost a century later. View the Prokudin-Gorskii photographs of Czarist Russia.

The Lumiere Autochrome process has also left a beautiful legacy.

12

Autochromes of World War I.

13

Walloon, those images are stunning!

I had no idea people were doing that that early… my impression is that colour photography did not become common until the second world war. Of course, thinkling about it, being the Imperial Photographer would not have been a ‘common’ position, and a lot of those pictures look posed: the water behind some pf the people is multicoloured, for instance. Did they have to stand for a long time while the photographer changed plates? So maybe what came later was instant colour photography.

Time to forward the links. :slight_smile:

14

The b/w photographic plates were instant. But Prokudin-Gorskii exposed the three plates sequentially, not simultaneously. Because the sunlight glimmering off water is constantly changing, each plate (and thus each color) gots its own separate glimmers of sunlight, and that’s what you see the multicolor artifacts on the water.