amateur and professional photographers of today have THE available for use color films, in which three organic dyes are synthesized during the development of the conventional photographic silver image. The process was discovered by Fischer (6) in 1912 and was named by the inventor "the process of color-forming development."In the conventional photographic development process, the silver ion in the exposed light-sensitive silver halide is reduced to the silver atom and an image consisting of metallic silver is produced. This reduction is brought about by so-called developers, mostly organic aromatic hydroxy or amino compounds, such as hydroquinone, p-aminophenol, or p-phenylenediamine and their substitution products. During the reduction of the silver ions, the organic developing substance becomes oxidized.In the process of color-forming development, the oxidized form of a photographic developing substance is condensed with a second substance, an active coupler, to form a dye. The reaction can be represented by the equations given in Figure 1. Dye condensation takes place in situ and in direct proportion with the formation of the silver image. Color-forming development yields, therefore, a silver image intimately associated with a dye image. The silver image can be removed by standard bleaching processes, and pure dye images can be obtained.I n color photography, it has become accepted practice to use three suitably selected colors as primaries.Yellow. Green and red transmittant: blue absorbant: minus Magenta. Red and blue transmittant: green absorbant:Cyan. Blue and green transmittant: red absorbant: minus blue minus green red By mixing these primaries in various proportions, a complete range of colors can be matched in a manner satisfactory to the average human observer. Fischer has suggested, as couplers, three classes of colorless compounds which form the three essential primary colors with one common developing substance.In Figure 1 are shown examples of dye; obtainable by colorforming development. A single developing substance, N , Ndiethyl-p-phenylenediamine, is used in all three cases. With an open-chain ketomethylene compound, such as acetoacetanilide, a yellow dye results. A magenta dye is obtained from 1-phenyl-3-methyl-5-pyrasolone. The yellow and magenta dyes belong to the azomethine class. When a phenolic compound, such as l-hydroxy-2-naphthanilide, is used as the coupler, a cyan dye, which is of the quinoneimine class, is obtained.It was fortunate that Fischer was able to select a class of dyes, ax, bx, cx, which possessed characteristic absorption bands in the three principal regions of the visible spectrum and which could be obtained by the condensation of a single oxidized developer, z, with one of three colorless couplers, a, b, c.