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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

As a photographer, this post is way full of crap - look at famous photographs, and you will see the exact same thing even before the days of Photoshop.

These colors are used because they work, and they project a certain effect on your images. Blaming this on the advent of computers is disingenuous - photographers have been shooting at Golden Hour for generations to capture the contrasty orangeness since God knows when.

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In stage lighting, actors typically are lit from two sides one "hot" (orange) and one "cool" (teal):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCandless_Method#McCandless_Me...

This is hardly a new digital phenomenon, it's done because it works. The digital editors are emulating what's been done using colored light for 90 years.

I think the critique is less the use of the technique and more the ubiquity of it. Digital lighting can easy appear curious and unreal.

He said that computers have caused this in movies, because now every frame can be manipulated separately.

Right, but I fail to see how a valid artistic theme in photography suddenly becomes lazy me-too-ism when applied to film.

Art goes through phases - maybe there was that guy back during the Renaissance complaining about how all the sculptures looked the same, etc etc. This is simply the way art goes.

Sometimes technology makes it easier to do something, and then people do that thing more than they did before, to the point where they're doing it too much.

It's like AutoTune in music: people have always tried to sing in tune, but now they can sing even more in tune, and so current pop music has almost lost the naturalism and emotional effects produced by subtle variance in pitch.

Isn't that simply a matter of aesthetics though? I don't much like autotune either, but I'm willing to admit the possibility that it's simply because I grew up listening to a different aesthetic.

We've certainly lost a lot of aesthetics as art styles changed over time - when's the last time you saw a good tapestry? I don't see this as particularly bad, though, it's simply "the way it is" in art. Periodically we will exchange one thing for another, and life goes on.

No, it's not an opinion, autotune is evil :)

... which, of course, creates another emotional effect, and thus is actually working!

I agree it can become a bit silly when lots of different singers start sounding alike, but when done well it can really work and have definite effect.

I don't mean the T-Pain style 'AutoTune-as-an-effect' -- I mean the subtler use of AutoTune to correct minor fluctuations in a natural-sounding performance.

Yes, but instead of manipulating them separately, they apply one same filter to all the film, even frames with now face in it. Which means some frames have no contrast in them (screenshot Wolfman #2), others make irrelevant objects stand out (Hot Tub #2). Great article.

I actually like the effect.

Exactly. If you light the actors with warm light, the background would become blueish. These days you just set the right color balance, before they used corrective filters (slightly blueish in this case). The result is the same.

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