Although the brilliance of the Americans overshadowed to some extent the work of the British school, that too reached a high level of excellence during the same period whilst its effort has been more sustained, so that in the subsequent twenty years British pictorial photography has taken more and more the leading posi tion in the world's work, rather, perhaps, by reason of its sanity and sober pictorial excellence than by any quality of brilliance or progressive novelty of outlook.
The development of the colour sensitive plate, culminating in the Panchromatic plate in 1906, affected pictorial but little and even twenty years later, although most photogra phers use negative material that is orthochromatic to some extent, they are somewhat conservative in their attitude to panchromatics, principally because they are apt to give harsh results unless devel oped with more discretion than the average photographer pos sesses.
The introduction of the soft gradation Panchromatic plate by the Ilford Co. in 1928 may serve to break down this prejudice and get rid of the bugbear of "over-correction" which in most cases would be described more correctly as over-development.
A very useful modification of this, known as Bromoil, was worked out by C. Welborne Piper in 1907. In this a Bromide print or enlargement is bleached in a special solution and can then be inked up in the manner described. The latest modification consists in transferring the inked image by means of pressure to a sheet of plain paper. This is the transfer process and bids fair to be the chief pictorial printing medium of the future, for the image then consists of a permanent pigment on pure paper, the whole process is under the photographer's control, and as many printings can be superimposed as may be necessary to secure the desired result.