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Why is the world losing color?

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Re: Why is the world losing color?

#291

Post by WorldMaker »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #130
JKCalhoun wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wild. Because that is one of the first, most heavily color graded films I can recall. Theoden's coming out from under the spell of Saruman is the most hit-you-ver-the-head use of color-grading that I can think of. (And, perhaps in a fantasy film it's fine.)

Last night I watched Erin Brokovitch (2000) and it was like looking at film that had been partially sepia-processed with the heavy handedness of the grading. The Matrix was a year before that, but they had a narrative reason to use grading, and did so quite well.

The Matrix also had a technical reason/glitch that pushed them earlier in the process to pursue the narrative reason. (Per some of the commentary, the early effects work they were doing, such as processing the first versions of "bullet time", were very susceptible to green/blue screen leakage so they leaned into that, and used it to decide which shots should use green or blue screens and let that leakage drive other parts of the color grading, including introduce "fake" color leaks onto set work that didn't use chroma keying [green/blue screens].)

Re: Why is the world losing color?

#292

Post by 9rx »

WorldMaker wrote: post #289
9rx wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say farm equipment has embraced the same "meaner" trend, but has also doubled down on bright, vibrant colours. Noticeably, though, the colours don't date the equipment. 20 years ago the colours were the same, and 20 years from now it is very likely that the brand new ones will still feature the same colours still. That hasn't been the case for passenger vehicles. They are famous for having a colour available this…

Farm and construction equipment the colors are dominated by brand. Team Green Equipment versus Team Red Equipment versus Team Yellow Equipment versus Team Orange Equipment, pick your side. Each side is effectively monochromatic within whatever their brand tolerance is for their brand's color. John Deere's green is a very specific single Pantone shade and has stuck to it consistently as long as color standards have al…

> Team Orange Equipment

Case in point. The last of the ACGO tractors in orange now look old and dated even though the otherwise _identical_[1] Massey Ferguson tractors from the same era still look relatively modern.

[1] Technically they had different engines, but that isn't visible anyway.

Re: Why is the world losing color?

#293

Post by _DeadFred_ »

crazygringo wrote: post #3

It's not "losing" color. At periods when technology resulted in new color possibilities, people went overboard with color. Make all the things colorful!! Think of the technicolor sixties. And we can go back in history and see the same thing with new clothing pigments, new paint pigments. But when everything is colorful, nothing stands out. Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone…

When I was a kid Santa Cruz's Highway 1 had all these bushes with flowers, and lots of ice plant. It's now asphaul, concrete, road debris. The flowers were never distracting and I actually much preferred the drive in the past. When I go back today it's just grey and dreary, not 'focus enabling'.

Re: Why is the world losing color?

#294

Post by crazygringo »

troupo wrote: post #278
crazygringo wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I'm not deducing anything, I'm speaking from my experience in television. Yes, the type of drama does include the range you're describing. Movies are mixes of genres, tones, categories. And no, modern comedies are not desaturated "more often than not". I don't know what comedies you're watching, but it's not the case.

> Yes, the type of drama does include the range you're describing When your "certain type of drama" covers every genre under the sun, and you pretend that Dexter and Justice League are somehow the dame type of genre, excuse me for bot taking your words seriously. > I don't know what comedies you're watching, but it's not the case. Whatever comes across my radar. BTW it's also quite telling how in your classification…

I don't know what to tell you. I don't know if you're intentionally trying to misunderstand me or what.

I never said "genre". I said "type of drama". There are probably a hundred subgenres of drama, yes including both Dexter and Justice League. There isn't some clean perfect distinction for which directors choose go use the dark look and which don't. I'm lumping the ones that go dark into a "type". I've got to use some word to group them.

Also, what do you mean "the only two you could come up with that are not"? There are fundamentally three types of entertainment TV: comedy, reality, and drama. Only one of them adopts the dark look commonly, in some of its content.

And you're just flat-out wrong about comedies being "often just as drab and gray as every other genre". That's just... wrong. I don't know what else to tell you.

Re: Why is the world losing color?

#295

Post by crazygringo »

mrandish wrote: post #241
crazygringo wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video you link has turned into a classic. But I also disagree with its claim that black shadows everywhere are "cinematic" and desirable. They're a limitation of film at the time. When I watch those classic movies, I don't like the fact that all the shadows are crushed. I feel like half the frame is hiding texture that ought to be there. I like the dynamic range of modern cameras. We didn't "forget" how to "make…

I broadly agree with what you're saying. In my post, I was specifically addressing cases where a lack of expressive diversity in looks is a result of the factors discussed - basically the failure mode where color grading becomes a crutch instead of one part of an intentionally crafted look. In non-failure cases, color grading can be fantastically expressive and a key element in the cinematographer's toolbox. As I men…

> There are still too many productions that suffer from that default blandness due to a lack of creative intention. I just refuse to believe so many DPs really woke up passionately committed to that particular orange/teal palette as the ideal expressive vision for their current project.

Ha! Indeed. Yup, agreed on all points you've made.

Besides the obvious factors of time and budget, I think it's precisely the technical freedom we have that a lot of people simply don't know how to use. If we have 100x the visual possibilities now, it might also be fair to say that it requires 10x training to be able to use them well. I'm not convinced it's necessarily a lack of creativity, but more just a lack of knowledge and expertise around what's even possible.

Re: Why is the world losing color?

#296

Post by anigbrowl »

crazygringo wrote: post #274
anigbrowl wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to live in a bland environment hoping some random colorful person will walk in to accent it, though.

Obviously it depends. A room always full of people might not need much decoration. In a private office, you might want to hang a colorful painting and have some colorful knick-knacks, or a colorful sofa. You figure out the right amount of color accents for you. But without overwhelming the senses by painting the whole room bright orange, you know?

I have had full-color painted rooms in one home or another for >20 years and have yet to get tired of it. I like having the color saturation turned up high. You have your taste, but it's not objectively correct in any way.

Re: Why is the world losing color?

#297

Post by gweinberg »

izacus wrote: post #202
crazygringo wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data in the article is either not representative or didn't go back far enough. The best example, cars, only goes back to 1990. And the museum objects are objects a science museum happened to keep, that go back to 1800? Hardly representative of consumer objects in general. There isn't even a single chart about clothing. Glancing through historical clothing and car magazines from the past century is going to tell y…

So do you have actual own data to counter this?

Will you settle for an anecdote? Before cars came in all colors, they were all black!

Re: Why is the world losing color?

#298

Post by SirMaster »

HDR movies and TV have more color than old SDR stuff.

Go back and look at 80s, 90s movies and compare to 2024 movies and the 2024 movies have way more color. Except a few examples here and there that are stylized or graded that way intentionally, but those are few and far between in my experience.

Like go look at mainstream stuff like marvel movies. Those are all way more colorful than basically any movie from the 70s-2000.

Re: Why is the world losing color?

#299

Post by lesostep »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #136
JKCalhoun wrote: post #32

Wow, so much to rage about from the article. I am a huge fan of color and go out of my way to buy bright colored cars, phones, etc. (Not like I had any viable options for my MacBook Pro though). Resale value, it hides dirt well are some of the sadder excuses I hear for buying gray and "silver" cars (wouldn't be cool if they really were silver, not "metallic gray"). Meanwhile you spend your entire time owning the car…

> Meanwhile you spend your entire time owning the car and driving around like a brooding storm cloud. Living in Oregon I don't want a car that blends in with the asphalt and clouds. I want a florescent lime green car that's easy to see. Those are hard to come by. Also, I recall traveling to Athens Greece back in 1999 and wondering why people were all wearing greys, charcoals, black? I posited that they were depressed…

>>Those are hard to come by.

Offtopic, but did you look into painting options? It's often cheaper to buy a better car and just repaint it. My friend have a lime car (with some original color saved for the accents) because they did that. You mentioned the colour specifically and I remembered that it wasn't that pricey

Re: Why is the world losing color?

#300

Post by johnea »

> "Baroque art" ?

I guess these people weren't alive in the 1960s 8-/ The psychedelic era had color everywhere.

Not only color in design, but in people's general appearance. When I look through my highschool yearbook (1977), I'm shocked (shocked I tell you) at how _different_ everyone looked, not from now, but from each otther, then. I'm not just talking about stoners vs jocks, everyone had an individual look based around their overall physical characteristics.

Now, it's mostly Justin Beeber nazi-haircuts, and the ubiquitous "please run me over in the crosswalk" black clothing fashion statement.

In general, people aren't attempting to have an autonomous indivduality, instead everyone (wing-nut and woke-nut alike) are striving to value posture in their chosen identity "community".

How boring...

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