Cibachrome prints featured bright, saturated colors, but had the most brutal contrast of any print media I have ever used. It was the #5 Brovira of color printing. If a Kodachrome had maybe 6 stop of dynamic range, when printed on Cibachrome that was knocked down to more like 4 stops. For a good looking Cibachrome you had to do very special lighting at about 1/3 the contrast ratio you wanted to be implied by the print. Or you had to mask the transparency with Kodak Pan Masking film, which was exceedingly time consuming and quite tricky if you wanted to keep something like decent color.
Used to run Cibachrome in a 3.5 gallon tank processor with a nylon mesh basket holding twenty-four, 8x10 prints. Also had a couple of weird contraptions that would do, for instance, one folded-over 24 x 30, more or less. Nitrogen burst agitation, balky temperature-control valves, fumes, fumbling in the dark, it was awful! And yes, the checmical sets came with a big bag of (I guess) sodium bicarbonate to prevent the blix from dissolving iron pipes, which apparently didn't take much time.
Another process at the time was Kodak "Type R" prints. The R stands for reversal. A much tamer but more complicated chemical set and much less contrast buildup than Cibachrome. Also a surface that looked much nicer than the rather plastic-fantastic look of Cibachrome prints. Atkinson-Stedco was the supreme Type R lab in LA, I often used their services in the good old 70's.