Many people consider Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressberger’s 1948 production “The Red Shoes ,” photographed by Jack Cardiff, to be one of the most beautiful three-strip Technicolor films ever made.

Previous restorations in the 1970s and 1980s had used optical printing from B&W protection masters to combine the three images on Eastmancolor film, and though correct color registration was successfully accomplished, a contrast build-up caused by optical printing resulted in somewhat harsh color in the resulting negatives and prints.

In 2006, The Film Foundation asked UCLA Film & Television Archive to work with them on a new 35mm restoration of the film that would utilize the best of today’s technology to recapture the qualities of Technicolor dye transfer prints of the 1940s. The original plan was to do the work photochemically, using wet printing from the original YCM camera negatives as UCLA had done previously on many Technicolor movies ranging from the first successful three-strip feature film “Becky Sharp” (1935) to “The Barefoot Contessa” (1954), one of the last films photographed in the three-strip process.

However, a multitude of serious problems, including horizontal and vertical misregistration of the colors, objectionable color breathing, optical dupe sections with excessively high contrast, and the unexpected discovery of severe mold damage on all forty-eight reels of original negatives, ultimately led to the conclusion that 4K digital restoration of the entire film would be required. In the end, approximately 580,000 individual frames of the YCM nitrate negatives had to be converted to the digital domain with a Filmlight Northlight scanner, digitally cleaned up and repaired, and then recorded out to Kodak Vision 2242 stock via an Arrilaser.