How master printers bring William Eggleston’s colors to life

Few photographers are as synonymous with richly saturated color as William Eggleston, but the complexity behind making his prints is often underappreciated. In this behind-the-scenes look, longtime collaborators and master printers Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli walk through every stage of his dye-transfer process, revealing just how much work goes into each print.

Eggleston discovered the dye-transfer process in the 1970s, a crucial step that enabled him to move from black-and-white to color photography. Stricherz and Malli have been printing his photographs for the last 25 years, and the video reveals their meticulous workflow that turns a single transparency into three color-separation negatives and, ultimately, one luminous final print.

Over the course of the video, you see how laboratory immersion oil, spotless glass, and carefully controlled enlarger exposures give way to Kodak Matrix film, darkroom processing, and delicate gelatin reliefs that hold each dye. From there, Stricherz and Malli move into inking, rinsing, and rolling the magenta, cyan, and yellow layers in sequence, relying on timing and chemistry adjustments to fine-tune density, contrast, and color balance. The result is a fascinating view into the analog process that powered Eggleston’s shift into the deeply saturated color work that helped redefine art photography.