Colors in movies and TV: What happened to them?

Just another fad.

Visual artists are very fashion driven. As technology creates new possibilities, they get abused.

In the 80/90s music videos had fade/dissolve effects. Then in early 2000s a lot of them played with the aspect ratio "black bands" (like when you play 4:3 on 16:10), making them white, pink, or textured, with border lines and other effects.

In 2010s slow-motion (high FPS played back at regular speed) was the thing. So every other video had the slow motion "water/colored dust hitting something" scene.

Since 2015, color grading is the new fad. Also unnatural weird (LED) lighting, like the left half of the frame in strong red light and the right half in strong blue light.

Color grading is also infecting instagram. For example in city photography, there is quite a trend of grading them orange/teal.

There is also a lot of social pressure to color grade. If you don't, fellow artists will say something like "look at that peasant, he didn't grade his stuff, what a noob, putting out real colors, he probably doesn't even know what a LUT is".

And then you have the honest noob who tries to improve his skill, and he sees all the pros doing it, so he concludes that he should too, since all the pros can't be wrong, even if to his eyes the strongly color graded video kind of looks like shit, but he's just probably wrong and just needs to educate his aesthetics.

There will come a point when color grading will fell out of fashion, just like you rarely see a fade/dissolve or slow-motion effect today, and when they are used it's because they make sense, not because you must do it no matter what.

There's a strange but wonderful little film called Avalon [0], directed by Mamoru Oshii of Ghost in the Shell fame, for which i will now give spoilers.

The film concerns a virtual-reality game, with scenes shot in both the real world and the game. The game world is absolutely drenched in what that article calls "intangible sludge" - everything is a murky brown, and settings are usually fairly spartan, containing little other than the player characters and enemies. The real world, on the other hand, looks naturalistic, albeit shabby, given that this is set in crapsack cyberpunk Eastern European city.

Or at least, you think it is. Until the final act of the film, when the protagonist gains access to a "Class Special A" level in the game - which is simply modern-day Warsaw, shot straight, like a documentary, and as such is crammed with life and colour. After an hour and a half of the various shades of beige in the earlier levels and the real world, your brain has recalibrated itself to that, and so this perfectly normal scene assaults you with its hyperreality. It's a trick, and a simple trick, but it's amazingly effective!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalon_(2001_film)

The Lord of the Rings theory appeals to me, not because I think it's right, but because those movies set much else in motion that has plagued film since. For one: fight scenes. The constant cuts from close-up to close-up of the faces of those fighting did an absolutely terrible job of getting the combat across, whether the scale, the difficulty, or what was even logically happening. Many of the fight scenes in movies since have focused on the up-close, refusing to use the vast expanse of the movie screen to do what it's built to do — show large-scale action, give a sense of where this is happening in the world, and showing the characters as being a small part of that world instead of, well, giant faces grimly emoting.

Star Trek demonstrates the changing times pretty well.

For the Original Series, the producers were just starting to explore color television and they used the whole pallette.

1990s Star Trek feels more "natural" to me: warm where you expect warmth (ship's crew quarters, hot planets), cool where you expect cool (Borg ship), fairly neutral otherwise, though some of the sets did have an office-park vibe to them.

Current Star Trek, specifically Discovery and Picard, are about as gray-blue and washed-out as ever.

The pictures in this tweet show it perfectly: https://twitter.com/ShelfNerds/status/1481452739754405889

God, I fucking hate the current color grading trend of killing every color except for two opposing ones (usually amber and blue) and then pushing almost everything else into a chiarscuro of inky shadows.

Watch a 90s movie sometime and it will make you weep for how beautiful today's movies could be.

For superhero movies in particular, I think a big part of this is a deliberate attempt to distance themselves from the stigma that comics are for kids. They want to sell to an adult audience but adults feel foolish if they consume something too clearly sanitized and kid friendly.

The last thing any Hollywood director wants to do is make their superhero movie look like 1990's "Dick Tracy", or something in the Spy Kids franchise because it will drive adult audiences away. So they slather the whole fucking thing in grimdark so it looks like serious grown-up stuff who are too insecure in their maturity to watch a silly movie about dudes in spandex doing magical acrobatics and punching each other.

(This is also why so much YA fiction which is heavily read by adults is dystopian. And it's why modern superhero movies so rarely have characters use their actual superhero titles, which sounds corny.)

This trend is not really new, and it actually goes both ways: when you want a darker tone, you desaturate the colors and go for a "colder" color palette, when you want to get all warm and fuzzy (think romance movies, soap operas etc.) you use a "warmer" palette and crank up the saturation a bit. But this already annoyed me back in the early 2000s: CSI New York had a "cold" color palette, CSI Miami a warmer one, although (or more likely because) they were both mostly filmed in and around L.A.

Reminds me of an unusual and short-lived sci-fi series called Space Above and Beyond; it predates the current trend significantly.

“The series featured a very dark and desaturated color grading, apparently inherited from the cinematography of series such as The X-Files and Millennium, co-produced by the same team, but taken to a greater extreme. The strength of desaturation employed in many scenes reaches the level that makes them almost black and white (quantitatively, the saturation in CIE xy color subspace of a typical scene in Space: Above and Beyond is in the range 0.03–0.15, approximately 1/4 of a typical contemporary film or television program).”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space:_Above_and_Beyond

The video embedded in the Vox article is worth watching. I didn't realize the sepia tones in O' Brother, Where Art Thou were a digital effect using techniques that were very new at the time. The film was digitized, color altered and then printed back to film for distribution.

I've uploaded a before and after shot of the baptism scene here: https://imgur.com/a/yAugAV0

Painting With Pixels (O' Brother, Where Art Thou)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pla_pd1uatg

Description: This short video about the Coen brother's film 'O Brother, Where Art Thou', the first feature film to employ a full digital colour grade.

This article and many of the comments here are mistaking color grading for being the culprit, when it is mostly production design. Grading is obviously the post processing of images, but production design is how the colors are organized to be shot.

Within this current fad, production designers have taken color theory and color symmetry to the extreme and bled all of the primary colors out of what is shot on set. Of course there are accent primaries left in, but they have this down to a science right now and it is why everything looks so perfect these days.

Cinematographers even will gloat about capturing "everything in camera, man" and only having only tweaked minor things in post. Roger Deakins supposedly shot the last Bladerunner like this, where there was little to no grading in the organic scenes.

While I think it's definitely better to get stuff in camera from a craft perspective, this obsession with applying the extreme uses of color theory and winnowing everything down to lifelessness is just so, so boring.

In the 90s things were a little more random and films had a range of colors that lacked symmetry. It felt real! But after the whole teal and orange phase of the 2000s (vomit), people took that same kind of reductionist thinking and broadened the palette ever so slightly.

> One truism of computer effects is that it’s easier to hide their seams if you are placing them in a dark or rainy environment.

I don't own the best TVs in the world, but for the last 5 years (maybe), I have to turn all the lights off when watching movies and series, otherwise I can't see a thing. And if the movie has CG they always happen to be in dark scenes, ergo some movies fully loaded of CG are dark, flat and I have to make an effort to see them (also happens to series/movies for TV only, like those on Netflix).

This, or my forties are hitting hard.

The relentless post-GoT grimdark is at least part of why new media shows more or less don’t appeal to me.

I have enough of that in my daily life, lately; i don’t need more.

Good old Piss Filter, also popular with games. From 'Ross's Game Dungeon: Deus Ex - Human Revolution' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYLEuQrvND0&t=350s conclusion - art directors are Lizard People.

>The first movie to use digital color manipulation in the way we’d think of it today — i.e., shifting the colors within a film image to meet a digitally achieved palette — is generally considered to be the 2000 Coen brothers’ Great Depression picaresque O Brother, Where Art Thou?

and not 1999 green tint Matrix?

This too shall pass.

And we'll laugh about it some day.

Like the "hand held shot" that became popular a decade or so back — in every serious drama the director seemingly gave a GoPro to someone with tremors. A number of TV series were comically unwatchable (well, for me at least).

I thought it was more because of green screen or blue screen dominating production now a days. They had to turn one color off. The side effect.

I was wondering why no one was noticing the lack of color and details in post 2010 films. Watch any 80 or 90s film and see how sharp and details those looked.

Games went through this during the PS3-360 generation. I'm sure it'll pull back over time.

In contrast, for Station Eleven they made the colors of the post apocalyptic scenes more vibrant and muted them in the pre apocalyptic scenes to give the idea that the post-apocalyptic world isn't actually so bad.

https://www.vox.com/culture/2022/1/10/22872347/station-eleve...

On the other end of the spectrum (ha) you have over-the-top saturation on shows like The Great British Bake Off. I know it's a food show, but people's skin and eyes sometimes look so bright when shots are overcompensated for food.

For comparison to the desaturated things on TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kMICkmW8r8

Yawn. Prior rant from 2010 which circulated at the time:

[1] https://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-h...

Spoiler: Its almost always an artistic choice. However, In some rare cases, its to make up for shit cameras: I'm looking at you RED/Hobbit trilogy. But nowadays its a choice to give the film a certain feel.

There was a while when all action movies were graded to look teal and blue: http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-ho... However when cheaper cameras, better grading tools seeped into the masses, that style was felt to have been played out.

DI, the stage where the colour "grade" is tweaked, crafted and perfected is now an integral part of the edit/VFX stage. Colour is used to push emotion, just like sound and music design.

The bit about LUTs is mostly distraction. LUTs are normally used as a reference, to make sure that all the footage has roughly the same colour (important when you have different cameras for different scenes) They are static colour offsets, so are great for techincal colouring, but not overly useful for making an artistic grade.

TLDR: Its a fashion, just like the pricks who removed the obvious on/off indicators from slider buttons.

EDIT: If you want to see some interesting grading, look up "day for night" https://noamkroll.com/color-grading-tutorial-creating-a-day-... where they take normal footage and make it look like it was shot at night

It helps with CG integration.

It’s changing now with color spaces like ACES becoming the standard (wider color gamut).

I Work in the industry.

Not sure if this yt video was referenced, but it offers a good overview:

Why are modern films underexposed? https://youtu.be/ctXc6YHIyac

To echo one of the possible reasons for desaturatuon trend is a curiuos widespread of badly configured screens out there. Same problem as was back in time in a random hotel an image on a room TV set would be way overly saturated and often the contrast/brightness balance would be off too.

These days the default profiles on TVs are better, but perhaps people's expectations may be off from the past experiences. Just the other day, by chance witnessed a neighbor's gigantic TV wall with a pronounced orange cast and almost toxic spill of overly saturated colors showing something as mundane as news broadcast... No need for any dramatic enhancement here. Well, perhaps the warmed tones are deliberately set for some other primary content ...I don't need to know.

So, aesthetic may be at play, but simple lack of a technical ability to configure the screens may still be the factor, so directors may be compensating for the target medium, which in this day is prevalently a TV/device screen.

I remember when Serenity came out. It was one of the first movies (that I had seen) that had bright, colorful, sunshiny days, with lots of visual effects.

I know that it wasn't the first, but I hadn't really seen much, before that. Star Wars had effects in color, but there wasn't any actual CGI involved.

One theory I’ve seen put forward on YouTube is that this is because modern digital cameras use a linear LUT when recording, which means that images displayed to everyone during the production process are naturally very washed out compared to how they would look colour-corrected to sRGB. As a result, production staff have become so used to the washed out colours of the linear colourspace that they’ve become accustomed to it, sub-consciously viewing a true colour-corrected version as being wildly over-saturated. The end result is that the films they’re delivering are desaturated because that seems normal to them!

It’s a plausible story if nothing else, but I would also guess that a large part of the reason is just fashion & trends in film making. A more saturated look will return in time no doubt.

It must be because I watch sci-fi more than anything else, but things have gotten more colorful for me. Compare Babylon 5's CRT-targeting colors with the vibrant lights and colors of Foundation or The Expanse. Though even Babylon 5 is brighter than the examples in the article.

There are some interesting visualizations of color in movies. It’s not up to date (last movie 2019) but shows color over time

https://thecolorsofmotion.com/

And this one. (Done in processing)

http://dillonbaker.com/#/spectrum/

Of course it makes more sense to look at each scene by itself, but it’s less fun

https://www.boredpanda.com/famous-movie-color-palettes-cinem...

counterpoint: B&W was all we had for almost half a century and many of the greatest works of (B&W) cinema came out after that -- notably Film Noir. Maybe B&W is good, and muting color in "color" movies is a recognition of that fact.

Mel Brooks made Young Frankenstein in black and white because he wanted to pay tribute to the original picture. It was a complete success, and he had to fight to get his way. Modern directors are pulling the same stunt, however their movies don't have a special reason to do it. The end result is experience detraction instead of additional charm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2RpZBP_vyg&t=2860s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQUqK_RJz9c&t=105s

One show: X Files.

1990s Vancouver. Rain. Grey. Science fiction changed from the bright colors of LA (Star Trek) to Vancouver's rain forests (X Files, Stargate, Outer Limits). Why were Star Trek's colors so bright? Desi Loe Studios paid extra for the color film and wanted to use it. X files was on a tight budget and couldn't afford to brighten Vancouver enough to make it look like California. So the backgrounds become dark and grey.

Similar things happened in many film. Alien had budget problems and difficult creature effects. Net result: hide everything in darkness. The color has as much to do with budget as art.

See also "Why Is Every Movie Poster Orange and Blue?"

Another overused (imo) coloring technique is different color sources, often used in youtube videos and game interiors, like cyberpunk.

Video games used to have this problem really bad as well as so much overuse of bloom. There was a few years where every big budget game looked like it had a brown filter on the screen. People have speculated it was used to much to try and hide bad graphics but I get the feeling it was more of a fashion thing. Luckily it seems to be going away recently.

I always attritbuted this style to one music video director whose career started in the 90s and who had perfected the washed saturation and goth look. She was the originator of Marylin Manson's video aethetic in the 90s, and after she landed David Bowie's "little wonders," that's when I think the style really took off:

https://etcanada.com/photos/171117/14-music-videos-directed-...

While I don't know if she knew the Watchowskis then, the original Matrix movie was absolutely a stylistic homage to her videos, and that they would have been familiar with her work via Bowie and Manson videos, makes it more plausible. If you look up Floria Signismondi's work, it's so distinct and often emmulated or copied, and once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.

Grayscale is easier to composite than color so if the lighting is off in one layer it isn't as noticeable or can easily be compensated for. Shots can be matched up with a common tone.

I had also wondered if streaming was driving some of these changes, by reducing noise and providing better compression reducing the image to simple gradients.

Weird that they call it "color timing" because "color correction" isn't all that accurate. But "timing"? That applies to film, like real, chemical film.

Surely there is a better word? "Optimizing"?

(of course "grading" is also used, but "timing" really needs to be dispensed with)

Crazy to me that someone can watch The Matrix and think "wow this is really dark and muddy". I suppose the on-ship scenes are a blueish gray, but they contrast so nicely against the progressively greener tint inside the matrix, it's nothing like Dexter or the HBO shows.

Interesting article, and all this time I've been blaming the streaming services for their incompetence with transcoding making everything dull, muddy, washed out with the wrong gamma, etc.

And it turns out it was actually the incompetent movie/tv producers themselves the whole time? WOW.

Kevin Can F*k Himself makes this really noticeable. The show alternates between cheesy sitcom with happy music and bright colors to dark drama with muted colors.

It's been interesting to see the same room go from one style to the other, really highlights how much influence these things have.

1. They credit/blame “The Matrix”, but let’s also note David Fincher’s work, especially “Fight Club”. (https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/movie-color-palette-david-...)

2. We still aren’t there yet on CGI. CGI humans are still in that uncanny valley. And what helps cover that up? Well, muddy up the color palette, and decrease brightness and contrast. I’ve certainly done that in my still photography work, where I was on a deadline for a volunteer project, and I thought to myself “you know, dialing up that vignette slider is really going to cover that up.”

The author makes the point that it’s somewhat ironic that the Marvel movies, having originated in the vibrant world of comic books, are one of the most prominent examples of drab coloring. But I wonder if this isn’t perhaps an intentional contrast. An attempt to recast what is often considered a childish genre as a more adult art form targeted towards a more mainstream audience, with a more somber color grading to match. Similar to how modern retelling of Batman have leaned to darker imagery, contrasting with the kitschy colorful 60s version.

Dark colors are an easy way to present your work as more dramatic and serious, and not “for the kids”.

Darker scenes can save on CG budget and time as well as set design. It can also be a stylistic choice.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. The last season of GoT was particularly agregious as was The Justice League movie.

No worries. I have solved the problem:

https://github.com/timonoko/Context-Aware-Auto-Brightness

And I completely disagree with the complaint and his examples. Too saturated makes things look unrealistic and plastic. I prefer scenes that make me think "holy shit, this looks like real life" instead of "yawn, another movie turned into a comic book".

There are ML-efforts underway to make games look more realistic. And they do that by reducing colors and reducing contrast. Because Caucasian people don't look orange in real life, we look a pale beige with a hint of pink.

The big part of the modern approach to art in general is to replace content with form. In film in particular, "Let's shake the camera to create an illusion of action! Let's show more facial expressions to create an illusion of suspense! Let's insert a lot of talking to create an illusion of... watching a movie in the first place?" (One could go on and on: fancy intro sequences etc.)

Counterpoint: Bridgerton. What amazing eye candy that is, not just because of the Victorian sets and costumes but the rich vibrant colors.

There seems to be a “standard palette“ or standard colour-template in use when creating modern video-content.

I mean, when my kids are seeing children's programming on Netflix I can very rarely tell what show they are watching, because they all look alike.

Maybe reusing a good template is a cost-saving/production-optimizing strategy?

I don’t know, but I can tell it’s being done deliberately purely by observing.

Smaller color spaces compress better per unit of time. Perhaps it's all a ploy to save on S3 egress charges. /s

I think this can be pretty much summed up along the lines of: way back when colour was introduced into film people wanted to show it off more, it was something magical whereas now everyone wants to be all edgy and gritty.

Or.... it's the lizard people controlling the world and making everyone miserable by using only dark grim colours?!

it's the film equivalent of midcentury-Scandinavian design in architecture really. Explosive colors, maximalism and so on have been out of fashion for quite a while, and TV shows and movies opt for a more serious, colder, functional look. Funnily enough I think also inspired by a lot of Scandinavian media. The Bridge which was quite popular internationally is a very muted, grey show as is a lot of British television, Luther comes to mind, which has a lot of success internationally.

I don't really think one needs to go for technical explanations at all because that modernist aesthetic of black and white colors is pretty much everywhere. Inside Apple Stores, in the clothing you see in offices or even at fashion events. If you see something extremely colorful or extravagant today it almost automatically stands out.

There's a lot of random mentions of this new hbo series, station Eleven, in this article, kinda odd.

What's also very interesting is the differences in colors between the original theater version of certain movies and the newly released remastered blu ray.

For example, take a look at Terminator 2 and see how the recently released remaster have a huge shift towards blues everywhere.

Funny thing. For about 5 years now I manually adjust hue, saturation and other stuff to my liking for each product, because the colors felt bad very often. Now I am just waiting for an AI colorizer to watch "Schindlers List" how it was supposed to be.

The color correction explanation seems kinda weird. Having the best color correction tools in history available causes... no color correction to be used? ("Look LUTs" are a thing but mostly a thing peddled by Youtubers to amateurs)

The movie traffic was one of the first I noticed that made use of this. However it was kind of a cool effect. Suburban home shots were a cool blue, and desert and outdoor were more reddish. I want to say they did this with characters as well.

It's funny they mention Ozark, but Ozark color grades very much towards the blue.

Just hit this with the show "Diriliş: Ertuğrul". Seasons 1 and 2 had vibrant colors. Season 3 suddenly everything is desaturated and desparate feeling. Super annoying! Presumably GoT influence.

Is there any possibility this trend is an attempt by filmmakers to mitigate the impact streaming service compression schemes will have on the appearance of their art? Less colors - plays better with something outside their control. I scanned the whole thread here and didn't see anyone suggesting this. I know I've watched titles that really seem to suffer from the effects of compression and others where it's not as horrible. the banding - chunky swathes of mono color that's distracting and needless, imo. Is there a TIDAL style service for video that doesn't use compression, or uses some sort of lossless compression?

I noticed this trend previously and I assumed it was a cost decision. A dark scene has less details, so it would conceivably cost much less to incorporate CGI/post-fx.

I had just watched a video the other day that claimed the Matrix's famous green color grading wasn't actually a thing until 10 years later in the Bluray remaster.

I also believe the advance of HDR is at fault here. 90% of the runtime of a show or movie the colors are muted to have an additional "pop" in the remaining 10%.

Once you realize that the Hobbit movies are either “orange” or “blue” all.the.time. they become unwatchable. I hope some future rerelease fixes them.

Conspiracy theorist here; TPTB/Hollywood is selling us on how bleak the future is, as if they wish to manipulate peoples emotions.

It’s so dreary and annoying that I even prefer the orange and blue blockbuster color grading in comparison.

Speaking of color, the new Wes Anderson movie, The French Dispatch has stunning colors.

Watch some color movies made in the 1960s. You'll be amazed at the colors!

Euphoria does the opposite, most of the time! Enjoy the hues!

The problems of washed-out colors making movie scenes look like gray wastelands isn’t limited to the digital era, if a competition were held then there are plenty from the film-emulsion era that could easily compete for first prize.

In the 1930s a quantum leap in the quality of color film occurred with the introduction of an updated tricolour version of Technicolor. The quality of the colour in Disney films and others such as the Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind (both 1939) was truly exceptional when compared with anything that had preceded it and the color still holds up very well even by today’s standards without any digital tweaking or remastering.

In 1950 rival Kodak introduced its Eastmancolor color negative process which used a single filmstrip with a tricolour emulsion that captured the full color range and by mid 1950s studios had a choice of using Eastmancolor negative in cameras and printing onto either Kodak’s own color theater release stock or to use Technicolor’s dye transfer process for same.

The trouble started with the introduction of Eastmancolor stock because it was far less stable than Technicolor. Technicolor is stable because it used a tri-separation process involving three B&W emulsions—B&W film being inherently very stable—as well as stable dyes in its dye-transfer process (for its theater release prints). As no photographic process is used in the dye transfer process, its dyes can be selected for both stability and vibrancy, whereas Eastmancolor has significant limitations in that its dyes have to be compatible with the photographic process (they use chemical couplers to bind dyes to the photographic process and there’s not that many options available). Moreover, color dyes generated by the coupler process have both a smaller color gamut and, as mentioned, they’re far less stable and fade-prone than Technicolor.

Under ideal conditions Eastmancolor produced good results but QA issues as well as Eastman’s theater release shock faded quickly, deliberately so—as theater release prints were designed only to last one season or to do one round of the circuit—for if film got lost or stolen it would be useless after a year or two (otherwise it was worn out anyway).

Of course, things never went to plan, and all too often faded, badly color-graded and rerun prints long past their use-by date made their way back into theaters and were continued to be used. The net effect was that one would often see Eastmancolor theater release prints that were unacceptable for stated reasons, thus it was not unusual to see significant numbers of movies that suffered from fading, significant exposure and color errors and even cross-color†, which, in my opinion, looks damn horrible even in small amounts. To help minimize these problems theater release prints would often be printed in somewhat desaturated/subdued colors as they were less obvious.

The Viewer’s Problem:

Whether we’re dealing with film or digital source material that needs colour grading/correction then there are very effective solutions are but they're not necessarily accessible to the home consumer (or even to theater projectionists).

What viewers need are TV/screen remote controls, that in addition to their usual functions, would also include optional features that enable the viewer to (a) either colour correct a movie on-the-fly or (b) select color corrections from a set of preprogrammed color terms (color correction matrices) similar to those used in professional photo printing machines (those which use color negatives as their source material).

I’m not just talking about the basics such as the usual saturation, colour balance, contrast and brightness, but also vibrancy, curves, shadow and highlight correction and midtone contrast. In essence, all the necessary tools needed to correct both exposure and color errors in movies similar to, say, those that one finds in Photoshop’s Adjustment menu such as Shadow/Highlight (one of my most favorite and most used adjustments).

If studios do a good job in color grading/correcting their movies then we need do no adjusting. But I find that's rarely the case. What bothers me most, perhaps even more than color adjustments are the all-too-frequent excessive instances of black crushing and loss of detail in the shadows and highlights and I want sophisticated tools to correct them. (Surely, I'm not the only one who's noticed the high contrast and crushed blacks in many of the recent transfers of old films to DVD etc. It's clear no one has even bothered to make any corrections.)

_______

† Cross-color is color distortion that occurs as the result of a nonlinear transfer process (cross-modulation) and essentially it very difficult to correct or remove because of the newly created intermodulation products (artifacts—new colors that weren't there at the outset). Cross-color in a film emulsion usually occurs when one dye layer bleeds or diffuses into another which then mix to form the new colors. Moreover, the amount of dye diffusion isn't linear across the transfer curve, it may be at maximum or minimum in the shadows or highlights or anywhere along the curve. There are many causes, aged prints, bad processing, bad handling, one dye being more unstable than another and thus it fades more than other layers (color degradation of this type is largely exacerbated by the film emulsion's exposure to projector light.

That said, cross-color effects can be corrected or eliminated in modern digital effects generators, that is if people bother to take the time to do so (and often they don't). Presumably in the near future AI will do the corrections according to some proscribed algorithm.

There's a great tutorial on color grading by Joanna Kustra. It's mainly about photography (she's a fashion photographer) but it applies to movies as well and she takes a lot of inspiration from cinema (old and new). Of course, color grading was always a thing ever since color movies became a thing in the nineteen forties. E.g. Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, or Tim Burton would have been very opinionated on that topic and very intentional in how they capture and process color.

Color grading is also something that is subject to fashion. And that's something that we see with recent movies and TV a lot because it is so easy these days. People are trying to imitate the look and feel of other successful works.

Joanna Kustra makes a few great points about how colors are associated with particular emotions and moods and how you can be scientific about using e.g. using the color wheel to color grade a particular scene. One key lesson from that is that color grading becomes a lot easier if you simply plan and orchestrate the light of your scene to match what you want rather than trying to fix it in post processing. Old school but really effective. A couple of colored filters for your camera's and lights is still a good investment.

Check out her tutorial here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC8ol2-V7Ck. You may want to skip past the sponsored stuff about her monitor though.

Modern digital sensors capture a lot of information these days, which makes color grading a lot easier without introducing undesirable artifacts. Better dynamic range of screens also means we can have more colors and tones. So the over saturated look of the nineteen eighties is less of a necessity these days.

Recent cameras store color at much greater bit depths and with log profiles which bias towards using most of the bits for storing the darker tones (the human eye is more sensitive there). Of course this is a double edged sword. Because it is so easy, a lot of people do color grading poorly or lazily. Select a filter, click, done. Basically, Instagram is full of people doing that. There's a difference between that and doing it with some skill.

Understanding color and tone is actually not that trivial. Some people develop an intuition for it but a lot of this stuff is actually counter intuitive. And funnily enough, a lot of photographers and movie makers actually lack the theoretical background to understand this properly. Aurelien Pierre, one of the lead developers of Darktable has a few nice in depth tutorials on these topics on his youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmsSn3fujI81EKEr4NLxrcg

Recent versions of Darktable have some interesting modules that allow you do some really nice things with color grading, tone mapping, perceptual changes to saturation, etc. that he worked on and that definitely make my life a lot easier for post processing my photos.

Posted less than 24 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29909329

duller pixels require less light, so more profits can be made for shareholders. this is the main reason why marvel movies, the most commercial movies of all time, have gone that route. also the ceo happens to be colorblind.