Since 1950, color negative film has become the standard on which millions of motion picture and television shows have been photographed. Since the early 1970s, it has become apparent that the color negative film stock on which these images were recorded was not entirely stable and was fading with time.

In the early 1980s, Martin Scorsese spearheaded a campaign addressing the problem of color fading in motion picture films. The campaign stimulated public support for film preservation. The end of the '80s saw a new awareness about reassessing the conditions of our film heritage. For years, many film restorationists have tried to produce a photo chemical solution to restoring the color from old color motion picture negatives without success, until now.

In 1994, while producing the documentary "Trinity and Beyond," Peter Kuran developed a straight forward and very effective method of restoring the color to faded motion picture color negatives he called "RCI" for Restored Color Image® process. This patented process produces a new intermediate film element with restored color, fine grain and excellent retention of shadow detail. This process not only surpasses other photo chemical attempts to fix this challenging problem, it also rivals new digital technologies in image quality as well as price.

The RCI® process has been awarded an Academy Award for 2002 by the Scientific and Technical Committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for its revolutionary approach to this problem.

Faded color negative is characterized by yellow highlights and blue shadows. That is, the lightest areas of the frame such as the whites, appear yellow. The darkest areas of the frame, such as the blacks, appear to have a blue cast. This is known as "crossover" and cannot be corrected with standard laboratory methods.

The retention of photographic image quality.
Current digital scanning technology was developed for modern motion picture color negative film. The optimum range captured digitally using current scanner methodology does not represent the best range for faded color negatives. When faded color negative is optimally captured digitally, the red and green channels contain only 65-75% of possible data while the blue channel contains less than 25% of possible data. In other words, you don't have much data to work with. When this digital data is stretched to fill the proper color space, digital artifacting occurs. This artifacting is called "spectral sampling error" and creates anomalies such as posterization, banding or contouring creating discreet steps in a continuous tone.

RCI® restores the original photographic image quality, has superior grain structure,
image detail, and superior shadow detail.