Bold Cinema

How Bold Cinema was built

Bold Cinema is the teal-orange look, and most teal-orange LUTs fail the same two ways. They push every warm pixel toward orange, so faces turn to orange plastic, and they push foliage onto the axis too, where it sits halfway between the two poles, splits into both and turns to mud. This one only moves the colours that already live on that axis. Warm colours lean orange, skies and glass and shade lean teal, and grey concrete and asphalt take a teal tint in the low-mids that fades to nothing at black and is gone before the whites. Greens are kept off the axis entirely: pulled a little toward a true green and quieted, so they sit back behind the two poles.

Darken the world, not the person

All the brightness comes from one tone curve with real black in it and dense low-mids, which is where the poster weight comes from. The early versions ran that curve over everything, faces included, and on an overcast airport frame the face lost about a third of its brightness. Now skin is keyed and held close to the brightness your camera delivered (that face went from a third darker to less than a tenth), so the background goes deep and the person stays lit. The log versions also give the highlights more room before white, which is why the clouds in that frame keep their texture instead of going to paper.

Two honest notes

Two honest notes. It is a daylight and city look. Night footage goes very dark through it, because the curve that makes daytime blacks dense pushes a dim night wall almost to zero; for night, use Horror Green or Horror Blue, which were built to keep your exposure exactly. And a LUT keys colour, not people: a beige wall or warm wood that matches skin is held bright along with the face, so it will not go as teal and dark as the rest of the frame. If that matters in a shot, mask it in your editor after the LUT.