<story><title>Colors in movies and TV: What happened to them?</title><url>https://www.vox.com/culture/22840526/colors-movies-tv-gray-digital-color-sludge</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>323</author><text>Just another fad.&lt;p&gt;Visual artists are very fashion driven. As technology creates new possibilities, they get abused.&lt;p&gt;In the 80&amp;#x2F;90s music videos had fade&amp;#x2F;dissolve effects. Then in early 2000s a lot of them played with the aspect ratio &amp;quot;black bands&amp;quot; (like when you play 4:3 on 16:10), making them white, pink, or textured, with border lines and other effects.&lt;p&gt;In 2010s slow-motion (high FPS played back at regular speed) was the thing. So every other video had the slow motion &amp;quot;water&amp;#x2F;colored dust hitting something&amp;quot; scene.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;Color grading is also infecting instagram. For example in city photography, there is quite a trend of grading them orange&amp;#x2F;teal.&lt;p&gt;There is also a lot of social pressure to color grade. If you don&amp;#x27;t, fellow artists will say something like &amp;quot;look at that peasant, he didn&amp;#x27;t grade his stuff, what a noob, putting out real colors, he probably doesn&amp;#x27;t even know what a LUT is&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;t be wrong, even if to his eyes the strongly color graded video kind of looks like shit, but he&amp;#x27;s just probably wrong and just needs to educate his aesthetics.&lt;p&gt;There will come a point when color grading will fell out of fashion, just like you rarely see a fade&amp;#x2F;dissolve or slow-motion effect today, and when they are used it&amp;#x27;s because they make sense, not because you must do it no matter what.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lloeki</author><text>&amp;gt; there is quite a trend of grading them orange&amp;#x2F;teal&lt;p&gt;I could swear I read in essence the same article about movies being all orange&amp;#x2F;teal a couple or three years ago.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: oh, that was 2013 actually. Ironically O&amp;#x27;Brother gets the blame for that too.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;shootandcut.wordpress.com&amp;#x2F;2013&amp;#x2F;01&amp;#x2F;01&amp;#x2F;teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop-the-madness&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;shootandcut.wordpress.com&amp;#x2F;2013&amp;#x2F;01&amp;#x2F;01&amp;#x2F;teal-and-orange...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Colors in movies and TV: What happened to them?</title><url>https://www.vox.com/culture/22840526/colors-movies-tv-gray-digital-color-sludge</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>323</author><text>Just another fad.&lt;p&gt;Visual artists are very fashion driven. As technology creates new possibilities, they get abused.&lt;p&gt;In the 80&amp;#x2F;90s music videos had fade&amp;#x2F;dissolve effects. Then in early 2000s a lot of them played with the aspect ratio &amp;quot;black bands&amp;quot; (like when you play 4:3 on 16:10), making them white, pink, or textured, with border lines and other effects.&lt;p&gt;In 2010s slow-motion (high FPS played back at regular speed) was the thing. So every other video had the slow motion &amp;quot;water&amp;#x2F;colored dust hitting something&amp;quot; scene.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;Color grading is also infecting instagram. For example in city photography, there is quite a trend of grading them orange&amp;#x2F;teal.&lt;p&gt;There is also a lot of social pressure to color grade. If you don&amp;#x27;t, fellow artists will say something like &amp;quot;look at that peasant, he didn&amp;#x27;t grade his stuff, what a noob, putting out real colors, he probably doesn&amp;#x27;t even know what a LUT is&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;t be wrong, even if to his eyes the strongly color graded video kind of looks like shit, but he&amp;#x27;s just probably wrong and just needs to educate his aesthetics.&lt;p&gt;There will come a point when color grading will fell out of fashion, just like you rarely see a fade&amp;#x2F;dissolve or slow-motion effect today, and when they are used it&amp;#x27;s because they make sense, not because you must do it no matter what.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lkxijlewlf</author><text>Sounds very much like what happens in other industries (such as software development).  &amp;quot;Look at that peasant, he didn&amp;#x27;t use Rust, ...&amp;quot;</text></comment>