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A similarly awful change was made to the color grading for several streaming releases of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It feels like whoever did the color ha

A similarly awful change was made to the color grading for several streaming releases of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It feels like whoever did the color had just watched Breaking Bad and decided to imitate the "make any scenes in Mexico have an orange color grading" style but for the entire movie: https://imgur.io/a/Ub5MO5R https://imgur.io/a/Ub5MO5R

dylan604 4y ago
just like everything else, styles/trends come and go in color correction. my least favorite was the flat/desaturated look. although, i still have my suspicions that came from someone uninformed/unfamiliar with color grading that the digital camera they shot on recorded the image flat in expectation someone would grade it later. (Recording flat helps preserves details in highlights/shadows.) i could then absolutely see some one else mimicking that as a style and the whole thing snowballed. your examples GBU are less offensive to me than the desat look. however, i still agree that it's strange to change the whole look/feel of the movie. color grading is as much art as science, so no two people will do the same thing. one film-to-HD project i was involved in used a colorist that would be considered a grey beard (only he was clean shaven). he "knows" film just from the decades of working with it. when he received the film for the HD transfer, he looked at what stock the film was, and then found reference film of the same stock. he then based the colors off of that reference. the director was taken aback by how in all of the years of this film being transferred by various people for various projects, this version was the closest to actual color he had wanted it to look. so just a fun story about how sometimes changes can be good vs keep it as it was. i guess as all things, intent matters
- rebuilder 4y ago
  Re: the flat look, I, too, suspect it comes from log footage, although I’m not sure it has to do with not knowing. It could also just be that if you do your dailies and editing without a LUT, as seemed to be common at one point, you get used to the way it looks and are less likely to go for a very contrasty look in grading.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    I've met more than one person that has admitted that they did not know anything about flat/log and just thought that's what the footage was supposed to look like. Not the sharpest tacks in the box, but not all "artists" are technically savvy. They had no idea about color correction because that was primarily the realm of film production. Up to that point, video cameras always came shot as full range. There was a big learning curve for non-techy shooters.
xxr 4y ago
God, that’s so clowny. I have to assume that it was a decision made by “smart people who know better” (just like everything outside my professional domain that perplexes me), but you could post this exact side-by-side to /r/movies with a title like, “So, I tried updating the color scheme—what do you think, Reddit?”
- dylan604 4y ago
  >but you could post this exact side-by-side to /r/movies with a title like, “So, I tried updating the color scheme—what do you think, Reddit?” but it's art, so of course you're going to get a plethora of opinions. some people just like warmer tones, some like cooler tones. even if you apply those tones in a way that makes the image less realistic and much more, ahem, artistic, people will naturally like/dislike depending on their perspective. the provided GBU examples and all others with side-by-side comparisons are stark, but if you only saw the "everything in mexico is orange" color scheme, it's not atrocious. i don't like it, but that's my opinion and doesn't mean it is wrong. when i grade images i shoot in RAW, i make decisions that others may or may not like. with the colors, i tend to keep them in the real world ranges if not with a bit of punch to the saturation. other people immediately hit the filters or swing the tint to get an otherworldly feel. at the end of the day, if the new color scheme is attractive to a younger audience and it gets younger people to watch an older movie, then is that so bad? it's not like Ted Turner got out his crayons to colorize a B&W movie.
thomashabets2 4y ago
Not just orange, but looks like they tried to make it "HDR" by dragging all the sliders to max. I usually refer to these kinds of amateur fake HDR as "clown vomit".
- dylan604 4y ago
  if it was actually using negatives during the transfer, it isn't necessarily fake HDR. the dynamic range of film is incredible. with a good colorist, you can grade something to have that HDR feel even if it wasn't specifically shot as such. yes, some knobs/sliders might get pushed to max, but not in the disparaging manner in which you mean. even in cameras shooting RAW, you can push the exposure higher knowing that highlight recovery is possible much more than shadow recovery. so you "expose-to-the-right" to allow for much more shadow exposure while pushing your highlights. in post, you can then grade/develop how you like. but yes, i'm tired of the HDR-for-HDR-sake post-apocalyptic looks as well
  - thomashabets2 4y ago
    I don't mind HDR. I'm talking about the, usually amateur photographers, who pull all the slides to the right, creating clown vomit. Do a Google image search for "overdone HDR".
    - dylan604 4y ago
      i'm not saying i have no idea what you're talking about. i'm well versed. just trying to add to the conversation that HDR feel can be achieved without having to acquire as HDR when shooting RAW and exposing for effect.
lostlogin 4y ago
Breaking Bad’s use of colour was great. In characters clothes and scenes. Also the car changes that progressed as character progressed (in colour and badness). Great series.
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  I agree, I wasn't trying to rag on Breaking Bad. But BB didn't use the Mexico orange color grading for the entire series, they used it to convey a specific sense of location. Meanwhile The edits I linked were applied to the entire film indiscriminately.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    If you want to do some sleuthing, you can look up the colorists name from the credits and probably the name of the post facility and the team there that worked on any title. you'll probably start to see patterns in artists/company names. just like in the dev world with rockstar coders, you have rockstar colorists too. once an artist works on something and gives us a style, all of the up and comers will say to the colorists they work with to "make my content look like ______". so that's what they do even if there's no compelling reason than they want to follow a trend.

dylan604 4y ago

just like everything else, styles/trends come and go in color correction. my least favorite was the flat/desaturated look. although, i still have my suspicions that came from someone uninformed/unfamiliar with color grading that the digital camera they shot on recorded the image flat in expectation someone would grade it later. (Recording flat helps preserves details in highlights/shadows.) i could then absolutely see some one else mimicking that as a style and the whole thing snowballed. your examples GBU are less offensive to me than the desat look. however, i still agree that it's strange to change the whole look/feel of the movie. color grading is as much art as science, so no two people will do the same thing. one film-to-HD project i was involved in used a colorist that would be considered a grey beard (only he was clean shaven). he "knows" film just from the decades of working with it. when he received the film for the HD transfer, he looked at what stock the film was, and then found reference film of the same stock. he then based the colors off of that reference. the director was taken aback by how in all of the years of this film being transferred by various people for various projects, this version was the closest to actual color he had wanted it to look. so just a fun story about how sometimes changes can be good vs keep it as it was. i guess as all things, intent matters

rebuilder 4y ago
Re: the flat look, I, too, suspect it comes from log footage, although I’m not sure it has to do with not knowing. It could also just be that if you do your dailies and editing without a LUT, as seemed to be common at one point, you get used to the way it looks and are less likely to go for a very contrasty look in grading.
- dylan604 4y ago
  I've met more than one person that has admitted that they did not know anything about flat/log and just thought that's what the footage was supposed to look like. Not the sharpest tacks in the box, but not all "artists" are technically savvy. They had no idea about color correction because that was primarily the realm of film production. Up to that point, video cameras always came shot as full range. There was a big learning curve for non-techy shooters.

xxr 4y ago

God, that’s so clowny. I have to assume that it was a decision made by “smart people who know better” (just like everything outside my professional domain that perplexes me), but you could post this exact side-by-side to /r/movies with a title like, “So, I tried updating the color scheme—what do you think, Reddit?”

dylan604 4y ago
>but you could post this exact side-by-side to /r/movies with a title like, “So, I tried updating the color scheme—what do you think, Reddit?” but it's art, so of course you're going to get a plethora of opinions. some people just like warmer tones, some like cooler tones. even if you apply those tones in a way that makes the image less realistic and much more, ahem, artistic, people will naturally like/dislike depending on their perspective. the provided GBU examples and all others with side-by-side comparisons are stark, but if you only saw the "everything in mexico is orange" color scheme, it's not atrocious. i don't like it, but that's my opinion and doesn't mean it is wrong. when i grade images i shoot in RAW, i make decisions that others may or may not like. with the colors, i tend to keep them in the real world ranges if not with a bit of punch to the saturation. other people immediately hit the filters or swing the tint to get an otherworldly feel. at the end of the day, if the new color scheme is attractive to a younger audience and it gets younger people to watch an older movie, then is that so bad? it's not like Ted Turner got out his crayons to colorize a B&W movie.

thomashabets2 4y ago

Not just orange, but looks like they tried to make it "HDR" by dragging all the sliders to max. I usually refer to these kinds of amateur fake HDR as "clown vomit".

dylan604 4y ago
if it was actually using negatives during the transfer, it isn't necessarily fake HDR. the dynamic range of film is incredible. with a good colorist, you can grade something to have that HDR feel even if it wasn't specifically shot as such. yes, some knobs/sliders might get pushed to max, but not in the disparaging manner in which you mean. even in cameras shooting RAW, you can push the exposure higher knowing that highlight recovery is possible much more than shadow recovery. so you "expose-to-the-right" to allow for much more shadow exposure while pushing your highlights. in post, you can then grade/develop how you like. but yes, i'm tired of the HDR-for-HDR-sake post-apocalyptic looks as well
- thomashabets2 4y ago
  I don't mind HDR. I'm talking about the, usually amateur photographers, who pull all the slides to the right, creating clown vomit. Do a Google image search for "overdone HDR".
  - dylan604 4y ago
    i'm not saying i have no idea what you're talking about. i'm well versed. just trying to add to the conversation that HDR feel can be achieved without having to acquire as HDR when shooting RAW and exposing for effect.

lostlogin 4y ago

Breaking Bad’s use of colour was great. In characters clothes and scenes. Also the car changes that progressed as character progressed (in colour and badness). Great series.

HideousKojima 4y ago
I agree, I wasn't trying to rag on Breaking Bad. But BB didn't use the Mexico orange color grading for the entire series, they used it to convey a specific sense of location. Meanwhile The edits I linked were applied to the entire film indiscriminately.
- dylan604 4y ago
  If you want to do some sleuthing, you can look up the colorists name from the credits and probably the name of the post facility and the team there that worked on any title. you'll probably start to see patterns in artists/company names. just like in the dev world with rockstar coders, you have rockstar colorists too. once an artist works on something and gives us a style, all of the up and comers will say to the colorists they work with to "make my content look like ______". so that's what they do even if there's no compelling reason than they want to follow a trend.