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.
Color design would not be a great choice for AI. It is not objective, and there are many, many "right" answers. It also requires understanding the intent and greater context of a scene. To grade the following scene, you need to have watched the Batman movie it references, know they're trying to sell jean jackets, and infer the client's preferences from their personality and previous projects.
"the way it was supposed to be" irks me too. You can't reify an artists vision better than they can.
I suppose I would watch a fan-recoloring. The movie would not be how it was supposed to be — it would be something new — but that could be something interesting to watch.
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)
You got it backwards, it causes color correction to be used everywhere. All movies and TV shows now a days are recorded with pretty realistic colors, but in post-production they use "the best color correction tools in history" to correct the colors into the grey and brown sludge that is in vogue. Modern tools give film makers full color liberty, and they use that liberty to apply the same tone to every movie/series because they believe that is how movies/series should look like.
I guess it's kinda like everyone in the music industry following the loudness war. You could have the best possible sound using the best available audio processors... but instead you just optimize everything to maximum loudness.
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.
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%.
You don't need to be a conspiracy theorist here: producers and filmmakers are humans too, they are impacted about constant bashing from media, social media and others than sell/promote fear such as terrorism, global warming, refugees, disasters of all kind. Also social media in our pockets tends to exacerbate the alarmism with every bad event reaching us instantly, and the good ones never really do. Filmmakers, being artists, they tend to express themselves, so they might be some of the first to show this new trend.
Media and especially social media are not a conspiracy either: they want to sell and they are also humans.
It's very effective too ... every "modern Evangelical prophet" (there theologically should be no such thing) that already believes the end is near more conjure and relate fantastical divinely inspired dreams whose plot twists are lifted from or hugely inspired by fantasy, comic book, and apocalyptic films and TV series. They're hugely entertaining delusions but would be C-grade at best.
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.)
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† 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.
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.
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.
I'm not even sure if this is true, because duller pictures also require blocking of light and besides, they are doing a lot of this after filming anyway (as per the article). I don't work in film, but I'm guessing most of us posting here do not. And considering that they likely already have the folks working on it and already have some lights about, the savings would be negligible.
And seriously, I'm pretty sure that the CEO being colorblind doesn't matter whatsoever. They likely realize they are colorblind by now and it isn't like they are the ones filming nor making final calls on color nor other artistic stuff. In fact, I'm going to guess the CEO is more concerned with money and the pandemic and that sort of thing. I'm honestly not sure why you would bring that up.
It also wouldn't explain the reasoning for, say, DC movies to be similar nor the myriad of films that aren't superhero movies to be the same.
