Teal and Orange - Hollywood, Please Stop the Madness

Here's an alternate explanation for the phenomenon (linked to from the blog post): http://prolost.com/blog/2010/2/15/memory-colors.html The origin of the idea is to preserve skin tones and other "memory colors" (stop signs, taxi cabs), regardless of how the rest of the scene is rendered (bright or drab). So it's not that film colorists are intentionally making everything teal and orange (or actually maybe the lazy ones are now that's it's become something of a cliche.)

To every generation there is a film technique which defines it. There was the smokey grey/green from the Matrix films. Michael Mann had his desaturated shallow-DOF look. David Fincher uses silver-retention on his film development to extend the dynamic range while underexposing his shots (thats why interiors in Seven were so "dark" yet exposed). Part of the device of cinema is extending the mise-en-scene outward and upward to the representational devices (projection, development and treatment). Part of the study of…