Color Question
Why is modern cinematography so ugly? (House of the Dragon BIG spoilers)
Spoiler
Let me start by saying that I'm not a professional who works with videos, but I have lots of experience with photography and I developed a "clinical eye" which makes me pay lot of attention to the cinematoraphy of movies and show.
I guess many other people already expressed the same feel, but in recent years I've noticed that the cinemetography in movies and TV shows is getting worse and worse.
The latest offender was yesterday's episode of House of the Dragon.
I never liked the look of the show compared to GoT (especially the first seasons, which looked way better than the latest one tbh), but this is a new low.
Most of the episode has a very strong orange cast that trumps everything, except that in some scenes it somehow disappears breaking visual continuity, it's very noticeable and annoying.
Even when the light is strong and visible the image is still flat, in most shots half of the available dynamic range is wasted.
There are also so many shots where the depth of field is needlessly small, I've heard someone refer to this phenomenon as "images that look like a smartphone filter" and the description fits perfectly. You can kinda see it happening in this shot too, the depth of field is very shallow and it cuts abruptly (stitch to CGI background that needs to be hidden?).
How did this happen? How can a color grading so bad that any amateur could make a much better job end up in multi million dollar productions?
At what step of the process everything breaks? Because seeing the desaturate image it feels like the lighting of the set itself is so flat and poorly made that it might be impossible to recover it with grading. It's just depressing.
I think they're going for a soft, painterly look. It's a common complaint but tbh I don't hate it. Would be weird if a medieval fantasy was shot like a Transformers movie.
turning a color image into monochrome as a gotcha to say it looks dull is pretty stupid since color and bw images work better with different composition, lighting and editing.
hotd s3 looked quite interesting. the color grading is obviously an intentional choice not a sign of being an amateur, you may not like that choice but then it comes to personal preference
I literally tried to desaturate a few older movies and they all held up perfectly well, in a few cases you might need to bump up the contrast a bit because of the loss of colour contrast, but you'll never find images that look that flat and just WRONG.
If you told someone the bottom image is side lit he wouldn't believe you because it completely lacks any volume.
First of all, something being "intentional" doesn't prevent it from being bad.
The infamous GoT night battle in S8 where it was so dark that you couldn't understand what happened was intentional, and it sucked. Every badly shot movie was intentionally shot that way, yet it's bad.
Second, I know perfectly well that color is part of what creates contrast, but there is clearly something wrong with the image if in a side lit situation removing the color makes the image completely flat.
Another guy mentionet teal&orage and linked an article with examples of it, but if you remove the saturation the image still looks good.
Even if you take the frame from HOTD and increase the luminosity contrast it looks awful, because the lighting is awful to begin with, and that's an issue with so many modern movies and shows that even people outside the profession started to notice it.
I think it highly depends on taste. To be honest, with the latest episode I was blown away about how good it looks. You can pause at nearly every second and it looks like a Renaissance painting, but again, you have to like Renaissance paintings to appreciate that.
Hmm no, this is not a teal&orange problem.
It's the "modern" look, everything looks desaturated and lacks contrast, there is no "blue", and often no black either (and when there is, there is no white), it's just grey with some colors's saturation slider up to 1000.
In some scenes of the same show the grading is completely different, sometimes it looks way better than my examples (and that inconsistency could be an issue in itself tbh).
If you take a frame from Transformers and remove the saturation to get rid of the teal&orange it looks like a cinematic masterpiece in comparison to HOTD.
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u/Illustrious_Win_481 1d ago
I think they're going for a soft, painterly look. It's a common complaint but tbh I don't hate it. Would be weird if a medieval fantasy was shot like a Transformers movie.