Shirley Card for use with Vericolor negative film.
In the early 1950s almost all color negative film sold in the U.S. was made by Kodak and Kodak had the monopoly on processing. When you bought the film the cost of processing was bundled in with the price of the film. When you finished the roll you sent it off to Kodak to be processed and Kodak sent you your prints. As long as you knew what you were doing (and didn’t do something dumb like shoot daylight film under tungsten lights) you got great looking prints back from Kodak. The exception was the rare person who processed their negatives at home and made their own prints. They did not like being forced to pay for processing they didn’t use.
Enter the government who broke up Kodak’s monopoly so you paid for the film, period. You could get your negatives processed and prints made anywhere you chose. If you still wanted Kodak to do the processing, you paid for that separately. Local labs popped up everywhere. The problem was many local labs turned out prints with colors that were all over the place. Skin tones could be yellow, orange, red, pink, or almost any other weird color.
Fixing the Color Cast Problem
The reason is every batch of color printing paper has a slightly different color balance due to the chemical mix inside the paper. If the lab didn’t know how to compensate for each new batch of paper, and many didn’t, the customer got ugly skin tones. It was a serious problem.
Color enlargers have three color filters, Cyan, Yellow, and Magenta, and those filters have to be set differently for every new batch of printing paper. Many labs just couldn’t master getting the settings just right.
Shirley Cards, 1960, 1966, 1974
Enter the Shirley Card
Kodak had their own internal standards for creating quality prints. To help all the struggling labs Kodak made Shirley Cards available. They are named for Shirley Page, a model that worked for Kodak and was the subject on one of the first Shirley Cards, maybe even the very first. A Shirley Card had a photo of a white woman, color patches (RGBCYM) and a gray scale. The Shirley card also came with a negative of the woman on the card.
The local lab would put the negative in the enlarger and make a print. Unless they were just plain lucky, the initial test print was almost never an exact color match for the Shirley Card. The lab would experiment with the CYM filters until they got a print that matched exactly the Shirley card. Once they got the settings right they could use the same color filter settings for every roll of negative film that customers brought in the front door and the colors would be right (assuming the photographer did everything right with their camera when they took the pictures). The enlarger filter settings worked until they ran out of that batch of printing paper. When they started a new batch of printing paper they would put Shirley’s negative in the enlarger, play with the filters until they got them right and they were good to go again until they ran out of that batch of paper.
Shirley Card, 1975
The Problem with All White Women
There have been lots of Shirley Cards over the years. The original name stuck, no matter the name of the woman on the card. For decades all of the Shirley Cards featured white women.
Problems arose in the 70s and it began with furniture companies. While Kodak films worked really well with light skinned people and outdoor landscapes, they could not reproduce brown wood tones very well. A light brown dresser, a medium dark brown dresser, and a very dark brown dresser would all look the same on Kodak film. Customers ordering from furniture catalogs were unhappy that their furniture did not match the pictures in the catalogs. Kodak film did a great job at distinguishing between a range of light tones, but dark tones would all clump together and look alike.
Shirley Card with Gray Patch.
The chocolate industry was after Kodak too. Existing films did not show the difference between milk chocolate and dark chocolate.
As a side note, as public schools became more integrated, school picture photographers were having problems too. Photos of light skinned students came out looking good but photos of dark skinned students did not look nearly as good. But school picture photographers don’t have the clout of the chocolate and furniture industries.
In the early days of color negative film, no one set out to make dark skinned people look bad. The scientists who created color negative films used the models available to them to get the chemical balance right for the films they designed. The models happened to be white.
Thanks to complaints in the 1970s from well to do furniture and chocolate companies that spent a lot of money on advertising, Kodak went to work. The scientists wanted to create films that showed much better gradations of tones in chocolate and wooden furniture. It worked. Dark tones showed a much better gradation of tonalities. Not only that, school pictures of dark skinned students looked better.
Adobe Shirley Card
It was bound to happen sooner or later. Someone wondered, “Why are all the women on Shirley Cards white?” Shirley Cards began to change. Kodak created their first multiracial Shirley Card in the mid 1990s. With the advent of the digital age, digital test prints started coming out. In other countries they created their own standards of reference.
Kodak’s multiracial Shirley card.
Who is the original Shirley Page?
The Real Shirley Page? 1960.
I have been trying to track down Shirley Page, the Kodak model who became one of the first Kodak Shirley Cards (maybe even the very first) and for whom all subsequent Shirley Cards are named. The earliest Shirley Card I can find is dated 1960. This is an example. Is she the original Shirley Page? I don’t know. This photo is on several sites that talk about her, but none of the sites definitively identify this photo as the original Shirley Page.
You can see a collection of Shirley Cards in chronological order from 1960 to 1980 at this link.
Are Shirley Cards still important?
Yes. Some of the best photo labs in the country still make analog prints.
Even for photographers who shoot digital files, many of them prefer to have their digital files printed on analog, wet chemistry paper. The digital files are projected on to the analog paper, sometimes using tiny LED lights. The paper is then processed in wet chemistry. My favorite prints are digital files projected on to Fuji Crystal Archive paper, an analog, wet chemistry paper.
The whole process still has to be calibrated to each batch of analog printing paper.
Digital Test Printing File
Shirley cards of yesteryear with one woman and color patches have largely been replaced with the modern equivalent which usually includes several color images along with color patches and/or some kind of gray scale.
Even with a totally digital workflow with digital files printed using digital inkjet printers, the digital monitor needs to be calibrated to a standard of reference and the digital inkjet printer needs the right profiles to get the colors right. If you send your digital files to a quality lab, their system is properly calibrated. If the prints you get back don’t match your monitor, your monitor is not properly calibrated.
