Calm Blue

Calm Blue is built backwards from a normal film look, and that inversion is the whole point. Most looks tint the highlights and drain the shadows; this one puts the colour in the dark and keeps the whites pure. That is what makes a frame read luminous instead of filtered: bright clean highlights sitting against richly coloured shade.

It came out of measuring a photograph whose palette was worth stealing (the measurements, not the pixels: a look is not copyrightable, a file is). The targets it chases are its shadows at high saturation, its whites near neutral, a cyan bias through every tonal zone, and nothing clipped at either end. Getting there took two guards that turned out to matter more than the look itself: sand, dry grass and concrete carry so little colour that any cast swings their hue wildly, so they are held at their own warmth, and skin is locked separately.

Two honest notes. It wants frames with real shade in them, because the colour needs somewhere to live: a canopy, an interior, deep water. On a flat hazy scene it will look pleasant but cannot invent depth the camera never captured. And what reads as "clean detail" is partly tonal separation, which this supplies, and partly edge sharpness, which no LUT can produce. A little Midtone Detail after it finishes the job.