Lenticular films, popular for home movies especially in the early 1930s, are often found in family collections as well as among works of famous filmmakers and film stars such as Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg, or Alfred Hitchcock.

These films featured tiny lenticules embossed onto the surface of black-and-white reversal film, which had to be exposed through filters during filming and again through corresponding ones during projection to recreate the color impression on the screen. For more details, refer to the Timeline of Historical Film Colors.

Scan2Screen’s research team has long been working on various methods—both analog and digital—to scan and reconstruct the color appearance of lenticular film on the screen. Hardware Designer and Systems Engineer Lutz Garmsen developed a scanning device, while Imaging Scientist Dr. Giorgio Trumpy conducted the research project deep-doLCE: A New Machine Learning Approach for the Color Reconstruction of Digitized Lenticular Film to improve the color reconstruction of digitized lenticular film,¹ building on previous work.² The effort to further enhance these results continues under the auspices of the ERC PERCEIVE project.

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Scan2Screen is pleased to announce that Lutz Garmsen is going to present their work at the festival Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. The session Microprisms vs. Pixels: How to Preserve 16mm Kodacolor Films will take place at the AUDITORIUM DAMSLAB on June 27, 10.45 am.

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¹ See the following publications:

Trumpy, Giorgio; Diecke, Josephine; Gschwind, Rudolf; Flueckiger, Barbara (2018): Cyber-Digitization. Pushing the Borders of Film Restoration’s Ethics. In: Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts : EVA 2018, Berlin, 7-9 November 2018. pp. 190–195,
(= https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/158944/).

Trumpy, Giorgio; D’Aronco, Stefano; Wegner, Jan D.; Reuteler, Joakim (2021): deep-doLCE. A Deep Learning Approach for the Color Reconstruction of Digitized Lenticular Film. In: Colour Photography and Film – Conference Proceedings. Associazione Italiana Colore. pp. 82–88.

Pfluger, David; Garmsen, Lutz; Trumpy, Giorgio (2022): Modern Methods for the Visualization of Lenticular Film Colors. In: Color Culture and Science Journal, Colour Photography and Film. pp. 64–72, (= https://jcolore.gruppodelcolore.it/ojs/index.php/CCSJ/article/view/266/229).

D’Aronco, Stefano; Trumpy, Giorgio; Pfluger, David; Wegner, Jan D. (2023): A Deep Learning Approach for Digital Color Reconstruction of Lenticular Films.
(= https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.05270).

² The original previous work for the digital reconstruction of lenticular film:

Reuteler, J. and Gschwind, R. (2014) ‘Die Farben des Riffelfilms. Digitale Farbrekonstruktion von Linsenrasterfilm’, Rundbrief Fotografie, 21(1/2, 81,82), pp. 37–41.