Following its incorporation in 1915, Technicolor developed a series of two-color processes as necessary steps toward full-color photography and printing. Two-strip Technicolor feature films like The Gulf Between  (1917), The Toll of the Sea (1922), Wanderer of the Wasteland (1924) and The Black Pirate (1926) each showed tremendous promise in photography and color design, but implementation flaws resulted in technical problems and commercial failure. After a series of technical and financial stumbles during the early 1930s, Technicolor rebounded with its new three-color process. The camera required an entirely new design, although it utilized many of the same principles already developed for two-color photography, such as a beam-splitting prism. The camera captured crisp, vibrant colors that were then recombined in printing. The Technicolor three-strip camera captured separate color records onto three strips of film. Light entered the camera through the lens and was divided by the beam-splitting prism into two paths. One strip of film recorded the green record onto black-and-white film, while the other two records were exposed onto two black-and-white film strips in “bipack” (sandwiched together); the front film was blue-sensitive only, while the back film was sensitive to red. 

Technicolor took great care in maintaining a high standard of quality control. A cornerstone in this strategy was the Color Advisory Service, directed by Natalie M. Kalmus, who once described her role "'as playing ringmaster to the rainbow'. The color consultants advised the productions on how to develop a color score in accordance with the narrative structure of a film. Set and costume design, props, make-up, lighting including the camera work were all controlled by the Technicolor company. The dominant ideology of Technicolor advised a restrained use of colors with an emphasis on naturalness, strictly subordinate to the story development. Kalmus also suggested the use of conventional color associations, such as red for passion, anger, power etc.

Three-strip Technicolor made its first appearance in a live action film in 1934, when a musical sequence in The Cat and the Fiddle (1934) was filmed in it, but the first fully Technicolor feature film was Becky Sharp (1935), released a year later. Backed by important partnerships with Walt Disney Productions and Selznick International Pictures, color cinematography finally matured from groundbreaking novelty into industry standard. By the mid-1950s, more than half of Hollywood films were being shot in color, and the decade's top ten highest grossing films boasted "Color by Technicolor." But as competition from other color processes increased, Technicolor struggled to maintain its more expensive three-color photographic system. 

By 1954, most color films made in the United States were being shot in Eastmancolor or Anscocolor. Eastmancolor single-strip process and other similar ones were coarser-grained and less chromatically saturated, but much cheaper and therefore more appealing to studios, and the new widescreen systems could not be used with Technicolor’s three-strip process. The film industry conversion to Eastmancolor happened quickly, and within a few years, Technicolor retired the last of its three-color cameras. Some of the old cameras were converted to fit the new widescreen formats (early VistaVision movies like To Catch a Thief (1955) and The Searchers (1956) were filmed on modified three-color cameras, though those films all used single strip negatives, not 3-strip ones). The Ladykillers (1955) is considered to be the last motion picture to be photographed on the unmodified three-strip Technicolor camera.

List of Three-strip Technicolor films (1935-1955)

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Gérard Depardieu and Andie MacDowell in Green Card (1990)

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Colin Firth, Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Leo Woodall in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2025)

Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, and Daisy Edgar-Jones in Twisters (2024)

Lindsay Lohan and Ian Harding in Our Little Secret (2024)

Michelle Trachtenberg in Ice Princess (2005)

Winona Ryder, Willem Dafoe, Danny DeVito, Danny Elfman, Michael Keaton, Monica Bellucci, Catherine O'Hara, Dede Gardner, Alfred Gough, Seth Grahame-Smith, Tommy Harper, Mark Heenehan, Daryl Kwan, Michael McDowell, Miles Millar, Philip Philmar, Justin Theroux, Marc Toberoff, Larry Wilson, Haris Zambarloukos, Hamish Doyne-Ditmas, Mark Scruton, Gianni Calchetti, Stephen K. Amos, Santiago Cabrera, Sean Verre, Amy Nuttall, Max Pemberton, Burn Gorman, Jeremy Kleiner, Sami Slimane, Christopher C. James, Noah Mendes, Skylar Park, Arthur Conti, Oliver Dracup-Nicholls, Matthew Lyons, Ian Hawkins, Olivia Rebecca Horton, Travis Campbell, Jay Prychidny, Joseph David-Payne, Caroline Lawrie, Nick Kellington, Tim Kavanagh, Rebecca O'Mara, Richard Price, Chloe Driver, Walles Hamonde, Liv Spencer, Adam Speers, David Ayres, Jenna Ortega, Juliana Yazbeck, Charlie Hopkinson, Sophie Holland, and Jane Leaney in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Mahershala Ali, Glen Powell, Jim Parsons, and Janelle Monáe in Hidden Figures (2016)

Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Lucy Liu in Charlie's Angels (2000)

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