Two-Color Kodachrome was the first successfully printed subtractive color process. At best it produced beautiful results, comparable, if not better, than many of the more well-known two-color processes of the time. Despite the expense and time put into its development by the Eastman Kodak Company, it never proved a commercial success. Its costly, complex and often imperfect printing was not suited to large-scale production.

The Two-Color Kodachrome process was developed by John G. Capstaff of the Kodak Research Laboratories. (Except for its name, it bears little resemblance technically to the later Kodachrome process developed by Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky Jr. in the 1930s). Capstaff’s process was based on principles first discovered in 1912 when he was experimenting to obtain a method of reversing paper negatives into direct positives by bleaching. The refined process that was to become Two-Color Kodachrome, however, grew from commercial studies undertaken by Kodak for Percy Douglas Brewster in 1913, in an attempt to achieve a direct dye-image positive from a negative for his proposed Brewster Color process (Mees, 1914).

Although always intended for motion picture work, Kodachrome prints (which varied from Brewster’s process considerably) were first perfected in 1914 for glass transparency stills photography. The first motion picture tests were filmed in 1915, and in the following summer of 1916 a short film was completed entitled Concerning $1,000. It featured the friends and family of Kodak Research Laboratory staff and was partially shot in Kodak founder George Eastman’s gardens. 

Kodak announced the process to the motion picture industry in 1922 with a series of trade screenings in New York and Chicago. It was declared that Two-Color Kodachrome produced promising results for close-ups, but was still being perfected for the filming of long shots (Anon., 1922). Soon after, the first commercial production to use Two-Color Kodachrome was released. The Light in the Dark premiered in August 1922 and featured several color shots of actress Hope Hampton, which were incorporated into a hand-colored historical flashback sequence. A week later, the opening program of the Eastman Theatre in Rochester included exclusive color shots of celebrities photographed by Capstaff in Hollywood. Among the stars filmed were Gloria Swanson, Agnes Ayres, Claire Windsor, Wanda Hawley and Shirley Mason.

A dedicated Kodachrome department was set up at the Research Laboratories in 1923 to handle a limited amount of commercial work, including some color advertisements and intertitles for outside clients. Between 1925 and 1928, Hope Hampton again appeared in color in a series of eight fashion shorts, which were produced in partnership with McCalls Magazine and distributed nationally by Educational Pictures. Development continued at Kodak even though the process was not being commercially exploited on any scale.

In 1929, a non-exclusive license for the process was entered into with the Fox Film Corporation (Sponable, 1930). Fox wanted its own in-house color process, which could operate cheaply without having to rely on an outside company, such as Technicolor or Multicolor. The studio invested heavily, building a fleet of 35mm and 70mm color cameras and two dedicated color laboratories in Los Angeles and New York. Several color productions were announced for release in 1930 under the trade name Fox Nature Color. However, in August 1930 Fox decided to drop the process before bringing any films to the public. After great expense and months of tests, it became evident that the complex Kodachrome printing could not be economically applied to large-scale commercial production. Kodak closed its Two-Color Kodachrome department in 1931.