Technicolor is a family of color motion picture processes. The first version, Process 1, was introduced in 1916, and improved versions followed over several decades.

Definitive Technicolor movies using three black-and-white films running through a special camera (Three-strip Technicolor or Process 4) started in the early 1930s and continued through to the mid-1950s, when the three-strip camera was replaced by a standard camera loaded with single-strip "monopack" color negative film. Technicolor Laboratories were still able to produce Technicolor prints by creating three black-and-white matrices from the Eastmancolor negative (Process 5).

Process 4 was the second major color process, after Britain's Kinemacolor (used between 1909 and 1915), and the most widely used color process in Hollywood during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Technicolor's three-color process became known and celebrated for its highly saturated color, and was initially most commonly used for filming musicals such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), Down Argentine Way (1940), and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), costume pictures such as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Gone with the Wind (1939), the film Blue Lagoon (1949), and animated films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Gulliver's Travels (1939), Pinocchio (1940), and Fantasia (1940). As the technology matured, it was also used for less spectacular dramas and comedies. Occasionally, even a film noir – such as Leave Her to Heaven (1945) or Niagara (1953) – was filmed in Technicolor.

The "Tech" in the company's name was inspired by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Herbert Kalmus and Daniel Frost Comstock received their undergraduate degrees in 1904 and were later instructors.

The term "Technicolor" has been used historically for at least five concepts:

Both Kalmus and Comstock went to Switzerland to earn PhD degrees; Kalmus at University of Zurich, and Comstock at Basel in 1906.

In 1912, Kalmus, Comstock, and mechanic W. Burton Wescott formed Kalmus, Comstock, and Wescott, an industrial research and development firm. Most of the early patents were taken out by Comstock and Wescott, while Kalmus served primarily as the company's president and chief executive officer.

When the firm was hired to analyze an inventor's flicker-free motion picture system, they became intrigued with the art and science of filmmaking, particularly color motion picture processes, leading to the founding of Technicolor in Boston in 1914 and incorporation in Maine in 1915.