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Born on The Fourth of July - Film


SRV1981
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11 hours ago, SRV1981 said:

watched this today but in way better quality.  
 

The color and DR was insane. I’ve never seen a digital look this good. It was so amazing to watch. 

Production process:

  • Shot on Panavision Cameras and anamorphic lenses
  • Using Kodak and Fuji negative films and Kodak projection film
  • No digital intermediary - editing was done on the negative

The image quality that blew you away was the state of the art in colour science in 1989.  Here we are in 2023, 34 years later and we have 8K RAW but it still doesn't look even remotely like that.

It's a pity everyone wanted more pixels instead of better pixels.

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41 minutes ago, kye said:

It's a pity everyone wanted more pixels instead of better pixels.

This! I’ve said it in a few posts. The market is pushing for more megapixels, etc. and I’d rather have 1080p with the image quality seen in that film. The colors just really drew me into the story. I saw a few modern movies after yesterday and was just like wow that’s digital looking. 

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8 hours ago, SRV1981 said:

This! I’ve said it in a few posts. The market is pushing for more megapixels, etc. and I’d rather have 1080p with the image quality seen in that film. The colors just really drew me into the story. I saw a few modern movies after yesterday and was just like wow that’s digital looking. 

Even watching a movie trailer on YT, then watching "cinematic" videos on YT will show, very clearly, that despite the movie trailers being right there, just a few clicks away, most online film-makers are in a parallel universe.

I understand that not everyone wants "cinematic" results, and that's fine, but it's just incredible that those who do are so far from the mark and it's so obvious.  

Maybe we're in a post-truth moving image design world?? 😂😂😂

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There were over 500 people involved in the creation of Born On The Fourth Of July.

It was nominated for 8 academy awards.

The writer, director, editor, cinematographer, composer and sound department have all won at least one academy award.

The actual camera and film stock only captured the end result of the direction production design, lighting, composition and performance of what was in front of it.

As such, it was the least influential aspect of what you were watching.

Resolution matters, "colour science" matters but being realistic matters most of all.

Waft the same camera loaded with the same film stock around without any of what they had in front of it and it will look as shit as if you did it with whatever the next great thing in cameras is.

We've all got the means now to capture a great image but still lack everything that goes into creating that image in the first place.

In this case, what we would be lacking would be the other 499 people.

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Just to pick one example that struck me recently, The American Friend, Wim Wenders, 1977

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It's also interesting to consider documentary. The Maysles brothers were early proponents of cinema verite in the US  (or direct cinema, or run and gun you could call it!) So it would have been one of them with a 16mm camera and a sound recordist. Here's Gimme Shelter (1970):

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If you're interested in cinema (as opposed to endless franchise regurgitations) then the Criterion Channel is incredible. Non-US users can Google how to sign up.

 

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4 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

Yes, but if that movie had been shot on a digital camera it probably wouldn't have looked as nice.

I watch a lot of old movies on the Criterion Channel and am regularly impressed by how good film looked.

I'm also often impressed when I see something shot on film, but in addition to that, I'm often impressed by something that I think is shot on film, but when I look it up I see it was shot on something like an F35, which shot 1080p and was introduced in 2008.  

Often the things I see from pre-Alexa digital cameras are on TV shows, where they wouldn't have had the budget for a colourist to dedicate themselves to optimising every shot, so a lot of the look must have been from the camera.

Also, and to partly counter what @BTM_Pix said about it being a team effort, sometimes the shot that is more impressive will be an external shot in full sun, which is something that most of us are much closer than 499 people away from being able to re-create.

This is why I've turned my attention to colour grading - the camera companies are no longer trying to create the kind of images we're actually chasing.  So it's either shoot on film or you're on your own.

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4 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

Yes, but if that movie had been shot on a digital camera it probably wouldn't have looked as nice.

I dunno.

I honestly think that the same techniques and skill they were applying to work within the parameters of the medium then would have been adapted and transferred to work within the parameters of the new medium now.

4 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

I watch a lot of old movies on the Criterion Channel and am regularly impressed by how good film looked.

Of course, I'm not saying it doesn't look good.

Far from it actually.

But, in my opinion, its because they are proper productions and, again, its the skills of everyone and everything from the back of the lens forwards that is making the biggest contribution to that.

In those terms, and its only my opinion of course, the difference made by what is behind the lens capturing the image is almost negligible compared to the difference that is made in what is coming into it.

I've shot absolutely horrible looking stuff on both film and digital so I should know 😉 

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47 minutes ago, BTM_Pix said:

the difference made by what is behind the lens capturing the image is almost negligible compared to the difference that is made in what is coming into it

But what about the stills from Gimme Shelter, above?

"Albert ran the camera, shooting his subjects with a zoom lens from across the room; David did the sound"
https://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/cameras-keep-rolling-at-maysles-films

That wasn't 500 people, if was 2, one of whom had a camera that shot film. If it had been a C300 or whatever, the documentary would be just as interesting, but it wouldn't look as good in my view.

We should celebrate the look(s) of film, and try to recapture some of the magic that has been lost in the gradual enshittification of colour that has transpired over the last 10 years. I blame log for this btw!


 

 

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6 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

I watch a lot of old movies on the Criterion Channel and am regularly impressed by how good film looked.

I'm impressed too after having watched some of those same films on standard definition TV years ago. The new scans of the old films are amazing. I was working on a project recently where I was wanting a 1960s and '70s film look applied in post. At first I was looking at adding grain, scratches and instability(gate weave) but then realized, the look of old films now is of high quality scans of film so scratches and instability are no longer what people associate with old films.

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There appears to be a broader context to all this.  I think that people fall into one of two situations..

People that are happy with the images they can achieve

This could be that:

  • they can't / don't colour grade (maybe beyond adding a simple transform) but are happy with the images they get
  • don't colour grade at all and just shoot in a 709 profile but are happy with it
  • they can colour grade, potentially at a very high level, and their skill is able to match their expectations

This appears to include people like our friend @markr041 who seems to enjoy the results of his many camera tests, and the vast majority of consumers, but it also includes quite a number of professional colourists who have high expectations but also high skill levels to be able to craft images.
This is also likely to include the cohort of people who have high expectations but are able to meet them by using tools such as FilmConvert or Dehancer and have had enough practice that the heavy-lifting of these very sophisticated tools is able to get them over the line with their images.

@BTM_Pix appears to be in this category, although he seems to be suggesting that the camera is adequate because any shortcomings are due to the lack of the other 499 people typically involved in creating nice images.  They do say that great skin-tones begin with the makeup department so this definitely has merit.

@hyalinejim might be here too, I'm not sure, but has certainly demonstrated significant skill in film emulations in other threads.  

This category of people rely on the colour science of the manufacturer to different degrees, but it might be quite significantly, and potentially spent many thousands of dollars buying that colour science.

I include even many deeply experienced colourists in this equation, as typically, even though they have significant levels of skill at their disposal, they're also mostly spending time grading footage from the best cameras around like ARRI/RED/VENICE and would absolutely not be able to get such satisfying results from lesser cameras.

People that are NOT happy with the images they can achieve

This could be that:

  • they can't / don't colour grade beyond adding a simple transform
  • don't colour grade at all and just shoot in a 709 profile
  • they can colour grade, potentially at a very high level, but their skill is NOT able to match their expectations

(This list is almost identical to the previous one)

These people rely on the colour science of the manufacturer and are unhappy at the manufacturers because the manufacturer doesn't deliver sufficient image quality to get the desired results.  

Where this is discussed on EOSHD is from people that are familiar with the colour that has been shown to be possible by cameras like the OG BMPCC/BMMCC, Digital Bolex, Canon 5D with ML hack, etc.  I think that no-one sensible expects a 3K modern MILC to have the colour reproduction of an Alexa 65, but the fact that a S16 sensor from a decade ago could do a MUCH better job than todays cameras is extremely frustrating.  This is where my comment about "more pixels instead of better pixels" comes from, and definitely represents my position, and explains why I have been focusing on colour grading - I have basically accepted that the manufacturers have abandoned us and am learning to do what I can on my own.

Cameras seem to be in one of several categories:

  • cameras that have a baked-in look that is quite "video" (e.g. iPhone, DSLRs, MILCs, etc)
  • cameras that have no baked-in look (RAW) and require colour grading for all the colour work
  • cameras that have a baked-in look that is very filmic (e.g. OG BMPCC, Digital Bolex)

Unfortunately the last category is now extinct, despite there not being any real reason why this was necessary or desirable.  There are thousands of people online who share this view - this thread has 3700 posts and is still going strong: https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/6-pentax-dslr-discussion/409881-ccd-sensor-cult-i-mean-club.html

What is interesting is that the vast majority of colourists are in this second category, despite having the highest skill levels of the bunch and even when grading ARRI/RED/VENICE footage.  This is mostly to do with film emulation, combined with their incredible visual acuity, which has to be seen to be believed.

It's widely acknowledged that Steve Yedlin has implemented the best film emulation seen in the wild in recent times, which was used on his films such as Knives Out / Glass Onion and especially Star Wars The Last Jedi which was shot on digital and film with the digital processed to match seamlessly with the film.

This article gives an excellent overview of the many technical essays that Yedlin has posted to his website Yedlin.net:
https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/6/21125680/film-vs-digital-debate-movies-cinematography

Quote

“The Last Jedi is the biggest display prep demo of all time,” Yedlin says. While the majority was shot on film, approximately 50% of it was actually digital. And no, the digital shots aren’t the ones you’d guess — because you can’t guess. “They’re mixed in every which way,” he says, for reasons as simple needing another angle on a shot and not having any more film cameras available. Each time, film and digital are cut together seamlessly, sometimes even as cutbacks to the same shots.

Yedlin won’t mention any particular shots or scenes, but that’s the point — visually, you won’t be able to tell. In fact, he says, when looking at them in post-production, even he had trouble knowing which was which.

The reason that I raise this is that Yedlins work is perplexing, because it shows that emulating film basically perfectly is possible, but also that it is not possible for most people, even most high-end colourists.  In the Display Prep Demo FAQ Yedlin mentions that he had to create his own tools to do this manipulation:

Quote

let me clarify that I’m not just “using” but designing most of these 3D tools that I use in Nuke. They are not built-in operations, but operations I’m designing computationally from scratch

He doesn't say it specifically in a nice quotable format, but the impression I was left with was that he built these things for himself because they're beyond the capabilities of even Resolve / Baselight, which are deeper and more capable than almost anyone on the planet (let alone these forums) could even comprehend, but are not adequate.

This is where we get into the difference between a colourist and a colour scientist.  Accurate film emulation requires a colour scientist, not a colourist, and the two are quite distinct skillsets.

Summary

When it comes to getting the look you want, it's either a case of:

  • camera colour science + production design + your grading skills > your expectations
  • camera colour science + production design + your grading skills < your expectations

The problem with the second one, especially for film-like images, is that we have seen it's possible for camera manufacturers to create starkly better images than they currently do, so this is enormously frustrating.  Obviously production design matters, but if you're just looking at people outside in natural light, this aspect is far less significant than the camera and your colour grading skills. 

When it comes to film emulation specifically, the cruel joke is that:

  • It is possible, because Steve Yedlin did it, but simultaneously it is not practically possible, because only a handful of colour scientists in the world are capable of doing what Steve Yedlin did to achieve those results
  • Most of us could get better grades with the great examples of older cameras (OG BMPCC, Digital Bolex, etc) than we can with modern cameras, so in a world where the only people that can afford to get access to the colour scientists is the manufacturers, they have deliberately not done this, basically cutting us off from that potential
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5 hours ago, kye said:

@hyalinejim might be here too, I'm not sure, but has certainly demonstrated significant skill in film emulations in other threads.  

Yeah, I'm pretty happy with the results I can get, at least when it comes to still photography when shooting RAW. Here's Portra 400 at box speed and a digital RAW still with a custom emulation that I made:

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I can get pretty close with 10 bit log as well, and I use a slightly cleaner variant of this for my corporate videos. It's probably overkill for my clients who would be happy with a digital look, for sure, but it makes the colour grading part of the job much more enjoyable for me.

I've mentioned this before, but I think that the people who are delivering colour to the consumers have been playing it safe. They're more concerned with providing colour that is free of artifacts and problems than they are with accurate colour. For example, in Camera Raw and Lightroom the default color profile for each camera is Adobe Standard (the others, Adobe Color, Adobe Neutral etc. are all based on this). Adobe Standard for all cameras has seemed to me get a lot more anaemic looking over the last 10. The reason for this, I would guess, is to avoid ugly colour artifacts like colour blocking, clipping etc. The Canon DSLRs used to have very accurate and properly saturated colour, but they would sometimes demonstrate colour problems in extreme conditions like concert lighting. There was a big thread about this on the Magic Lantern forum at one point. Nowadays, Adobe Standard is a lot more conservative. It's instructive to go to DP Review and download RAW samples of earlier DSLRs and compare them to recent models. I know that the Pacific Northwest (where recent samples were shot) is a bit grey, but so is London (where earlier samples were shot) 😂

Recently, I've been looking at Panasonic's V-Log to V709 conversion LUT which, presumably, is a good starting point for a grade. It's significantly inaccurate for recent Lumix cameras. In this image, the circles are an overlay of the reference colours according to X-Rite:
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Nevertheless, it's a conversion that is fairly robust. Colour integrity is pretty good in terms of colour blocking and clipping. (It's better on some cameras than others. In this pic, S5II, the reds get a bit blocked up, which you can see in the red lego block, appropriately).

I haven't investigated Canon and Sony's log conversions, but I assume that their colour is similarly on the conservative side. If so, it seems that manufacturers are for the most part playing it safe when it comes to colour and leaving it up to the user. This makes sense as it can be damaging in reviews to have a colour transformation that is accurate, or pleasant, but creates colour artifacts. And if a large proportion of users are happy with conservative colour, or don't notice that it is conservative, then why rock the boat?

I also think that the anaemic look is in vogue: contemporary TV drama sometimes looks like it's barely been de-logged. So, low contrast and low saturation is rife. In 10 years time this will be dated. It will be like the bleach bypass look of  early 00s TV, or the "piss filter" of 00s gaming, or the orange and teal look of blockbuster movies.

Of course, Fuji offers film emulations in-camera, so well done to them!

 

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30 minutes ago, hyalinejim said:

I've mentioned this before, but I think that the people who are delivering colour to the consumers have been playing it safe. They're more concerned with providing colour that is free of artifacts and problems than they are with accurate colour.

This makes sense.  The average camera reviewer knows next to nothing about colour grading, and these are the people that create the word on the street.  Better to annoy the people that have more expertise, and besides, it might encourage them to buy further up your product line.

Perhaps the most significant thing that Yedlin has said in all his essays is where he tries to convince people to look beyond the manufacturers:

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So, the question is: can we as filmmakers identify, isolate and understand any of these underlying attributes so that we can manipulate them meaningfully for ourselves, or are we forever relegated to the status of shoppers; browsing for pre-packaged solutions and then wearing the badge of brand allegiance to the one we select.

What is interesting about this sentiment, which seems pretty normal and par-for-the-course on these forums, is that the audience for his articles is the entire feature-film and TV industry and all the professionals in it.  It seems that the same "colour comes from the camera" mentality is shared by the pros as well!

30 minutes ago, hyalinejim said:

Recently, I've been looking at Panasonic's V-Log to V709 conversion LUT which, presumably, is a good starting point for a grade. It's significantly inaccurate for recent Lumix cameras. In this image, the circles are an overlay of the reference colours according to X-Rite:
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Nevertheless, it's a conversion that is fairly robust. Colour integrity is pretty good in terms of colour blocking and clipping. (It's better on some cameras than others. In this pic, S5II, the reds get a bit blocked up, which you can see in the red lego block, appropriately).

I don't envy the job of the colour scientists who are trying to make transformations that will be used on billions of images and has to suit more situations than any one person could even imagine.

Obviously these folks would have built large libraries of test images and would (I imagine) be able to apply the transformation to all those images and also to other datasets like the RGB cube and then analyse them for artefacts and discontinuities etc, but you're still grading billions of photos blindly.

It is interesting that the warmer hues (red orange yellow and browns) are darker than the reference circles, and the cooler hues are lighter than the references, which I would interpret as a degree of making things flattering, but it's pretty limited.

30 minutes ago, hyalinejim said:

I also think that the anaemic look is in vogue: contemporary TV drama sometimes looks like it's barely been de-logged. So, low contrast and low saturation is rife. In 10 years time this will be dated. It will be like the bleach bypass look of  early 00s TV, or the "piss filter" of 00s gaming, or the orange and teal look of blockbuster movies.

Yeah, looks come and go, like fashion trends, but what is old will be new again someday.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I've been binging Cullen Kelly colour grading videos and he's taught me a lot about the taste aspects of colour grading and also look design.  I found some things really interesting:

  • He spoke about wanting an accurate film emulation, and asked if people wanted the limited DR of the negative? what about the grain?  gate weave?  inconsistency in output when processing?  etc.  He said that when these film stocks were the latest in technology the people working with them were very aware and frustrated to some degree about their limitations, so now that we have digital why would we want to accurately recreate all those limitations, other than to make something look period-accurate?
  • More likely is that we want to capture what is desirable about film without the limitations it had, and in this case the question moves from "how do I accurately emulate film?" to "what are the desirable attributes of film and how can I recreate those?"
  • His approach to this seems to be focused around a few specific operations:
    • Applying a film-like contrast curve
    • Applying a subtractive colour model
    • Applying a split-tone adjustment (typically to cool the shadows and warm the highlights, but keep black / white / mid-grey neutral, although there are other variants of course)
    • Applying some hue modifiers (which I assume are hue rotations)
    • and if a film-look is desired, then adding grain, halation and gate-weave
  • He mentioned that he applies a split-tone to basically every project he grades, but also demonstrated that when applied subtly it is not visible as an orange-teal look, but simply adds colour contrast, which was very surprising as I thought this would always be noticeable

Going back to Adobe and their conservative approach to colours, I was surprised to learn that the colour model in Resolve is HSL (which is used basically by all the standard grading tools) which seems to be one of the least useful models when you consider that it's not a good fit for how we perceive colour, how colour works in the physical world, or what we perceive as being desirable or flattering.  

The kicker is, though, that you can't change it!  If you want to perform operations in more desirable colour spaces then you're left to do various complicated work-arounds (such as setting a node to HSV, disabling channels 1 and 3, then adjusting saturation with the Gain control) but this isn't optimal either, and more sophisticated solutions require coding custom scripts like DCTLs etc.  I don't know what Baselight does, but Resolve is one of the top-tier colouring systems that has been used from the very beginning to adjust colour reproduction of the physical world in an artistic industry and yet it uses HSL as its colour model.  I'm not even saying that it should be some other colour space, just that it should be configurable, but it's not, and all the other options essentially render your control surface and most of the tools irrelevant or inaccessible.

30 minutes ago, hyalinejim said:

Of course, Fuji offers film emulations in-camera, so well done to them!

How well do you think they work?

Fuji has some expensive and technically sophisticated cameras, so they're not a budget option.  I ask because I'm wondering if its not just the transformations, but perhaps the sensor itself.  CCD vs CMOS seems to come up in these discussions once you dig deep enough.

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36 minutes ago, kye said:

It is interesting that the warmer hues (red orange yellow and browns) are darker than the reference circles, and the cooler hues are lighter than the references, which I would interpret as a degree of making things flattering,

Well, I think that skies that are more cyan than purple are nicer but I'm not sure that lighter is better for things like sea and sky. When it comes to skin, darker reds and yellows is definitely not good as it makes skin blemishes more obvious. This is a specific problem of the S5II, though. It has darker reds than the GH6, for example. The GH5 has lovely bright reds, they're just too pink!

 

41 minutes ago, kye said:

How well do you think they work?

Fuji emulations - I haven't looked into them at all, other than seeing some examples online that looked nice. I'd expect that the manufacturers of some of the most famous film stocks in the world, as well as some of the most famous digital colour workflows (I'm thinking of the much-praised colour output of the Fuji Frontier film scanner) would be able to create some pretty decent film emulations! But who knows! Maybe they're erring on the side of caution a bit too.

But it's great to see a manufacturer offering an interesting colour profile for video. Panasonic's set of creative LUTs for V-Log are disappointingly crap.

 

46 minutes ago, kye said:

the question moves from "how do I accurately emulate film?" to "what are the desirable attributes of film and how can I recreate those?"

Yes, it's a very interesting question. For me, the colour palette is the first thing to get right. Then, do I want the split-toning (as he calls it) or not? All films have a colour cast in the highlights and shadows, none is perfectly neutral. And it varies from one stock to another, and it varies with exposure level. If I'm doing something stylised, then I'll keep it, if it's a nice cast (for example, Portra 400 exposed at +2 has extremely pink highlights such that some labs tell people not to shoot it like this). But if I'm doing a corporate video I definitely want neutral greys all the way through from shadows to highlights.

When it comes to grain, I love it for still images. But for video it will get lost unless you can view a very high bitrate file, so I usually don't bother.

I really like halation, but I haven't found a good way of accurately emulating it. Part of the problem is that it proceeds from highlight levels so bright that it exceeds the dynamic range of a digital sensor.

Here's a GH6 Iscorama video that I've posted before, with film colour emulation, split toning (in this case blue shadows and orange highlights from Kodak Vision 3 - and I'd guess this particular stock is the source of the orange-teal look, as all speeds of the film seem to have it) and grain that didn't really survive the transition to Vimeo. You can download the original if you're a grain fetishist!

 

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6 hours ago, Eric Calabros said:

Unpopular opinion: extreme hue shift is not art. Its a fad. 

I've never been a fan of the teal/orange look, which involves a lot of hue shifting, although I've consistently been surprised how much of it a movie can have and you still get used to it while watching, but I've never liked it for my own work.  There's a school of thought that you should never know that a colourist did anything with the images, and I've heard more than one colourist say that cooling the shadows just makes them muddy, so I'm not so sure it's an unpopular opinion.

What is interesting to me is how much of it is occurring in virtually every camera LUT and every camera profile.  It seems to be a different story when it's applied in subtle ways, being more like adding salt to a meal where below a certain threshold you can't taste it directly but just experience everything else heightened.

But the teal/orange look isn't going away, although it may get less extreme (it's hard to imagine it getting more extreme at this point!), because it exists in nature and is part of how the world works.  It's built into many classic film-stocks so has been with us for literally decades.  It is probably hard-wired in our brains to some extent too, although I don't have proof of this.

I feel my next stage in colour grading is learning how much of these things is the optimal amount where it adds to the image but doesn't call attention to itself.

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9 hours ago, kye said:

I've never been a fan of the teal/orange look, which involves a lot of hue shifting, although I've consistently been surprised how much of it a movie can have and you still get used to it while watching, but I've never liked it for my own work.  There's a school of thought that you should never know that a colourist did anything with the images, and I've heard more than one colourist say that cooling the shadows just makes them muddy, so I'm not so sure it's an unpopular opinion.

What is interesting to me is how much of it is occurring in virtually every camera LUT and every camera profile.  It seems to be a different story when it's applied in subtle ways, being more like adding salt to a meal where below a certain threshold you can't taste it directly but just experience everything else heightened.

But the teal/orange look isn't going away, although it may get less extreme (it's hard to imagine it getting more extreme at this point!), because it exists in nature and is part of how the world works.  It's built into many classic film-stocks so has been with us for literally decades.  It is probably hard-wired in our brains to some extent too, although I don't have proof of this.

I feel my next stage in colour grading is learning how much of these things is the optimal amount where it adds to the image but doesn't call attention to itself.

To expand on the above, here's a bit of colour psychology in which Cullen demonstrates that cooler colours are perceived as further away and warmer colours as closer, so it's a way of adding depth to the image:

In the context of building a colour grade by making a number of small adjustments, this individual adjustment may not even be perceivable on its own, but would be in the mix adding to the overall look.  Obviously Cullens example is stronger for demonstration purposes (and his LUTs are designed to be used by adjusting the amount they're applied) but the principle would scale.

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On 7/8/2023 at 3:06 PM, kye said:

here's a bit of colour psychology in which Cullen demonstrates that cooler colours are perceived as further away and warmer colours as closer, so it's a way of adding depth to the image

Its not simple as that. There are a lot of object color-background light combinations that affects depth perception. If someone really want to spend time on that, he or she better do it at the scene with LEDs and carefully selected objects in the background, instead of specific color grading in post. 

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  • EOSHD Pro Color 5 for All Sony cameras
    EOSHD C-LOG and Film Profiles for All Canon DSLRs
    EOSHD Dynamic Range Enhancer for H.264/H.265
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