# Teal-and-orange cinematic look

> Digital photographs graded like a Hollywood blockbuster: skin, sunlight, lamps and everything warm pushed to orange, while shadows, sky, water and backgrounds swing to teal, its complementary hue, and the other colours are muted. The blockbuster version keeps the shadows deep and the midtones contrasty; the Instagram "cinematic" version lifts the blacks to a matte grey and lowers the contrast. Photographers seek light that already mixes warm and cool (sunset, dusk, night streets), apply the grade with presets, split toning or LUTs, and sometimes letterbox the frame.

- Period: 2010–present
- Where it began: The complementary grade of Hollywood blockbusters after the digital intermediate
- Kind: Digital & social
- Also called: Orange and teal, Teal and orange grade, Cinematic edit, Cinematic preset look, Blockbuster look
- Page: https://lumogeny.com/styles/teal-orange-cinematic/

## How the look is made

- Split the colour in two: warm the highlights and skin towards orange, swing the shadows, sky and background towards teal, and pull the remaining hues towards those two or mute them.
- Choose light that is already warm against cool: a low sun under a blue sky, dusk with the lamps lit, or night streets where sodium, tungsten or neon mix with LED and fluorescent light.
- Shoot raw on a digital camera and build the grade in post (Color Grading or Split Toning wheels, HSL shifts of blue towards aqua, Camera Calibration, Curves or a LUT), then save it as a preset for the whole series.
- Decide what the shadows do: keep them deep with contrasty midtones for the blockbuster version, or raise the bottom of the curve so the blacks turn grey and pull the highlights down for the matte Instagram version; either way, check that skin reads warm rather than orange.
- Frame like a film still: set a blurred foreground against a sharp middle ground and let a lone figure or a lit street suggest a story; for the widescreen look, crop to about 2.39:1 and add black letterbox bars.

## How it is lit

- A low sun or sunset beside or behind the subject, warm on skin and walls, while the shadows take the blue of the open sky.
- Dusk and night streets where warm sodium, tungsten or neon lamps meet cool LED, fluorescent or blue-hour light.
- A warm key on the face against a cooler, darker background, the split finished in the grade.

### The rendered set-up

A warm key on the face against a cooler, darker background, with a cool edge from behind. Rendered in Blender Cycles on a synthetic clay figure or still life, with the lights exactly where the plan on the page puts them.

### A light plan from its choices (schematic)

- Key: the sun, from the camera’s left, at the side, low, hard.
- Lamp in the scene: a lamp, sign or screen, from the camera’s left, at the side, hard.
- Ambient light: the open sky, from behind, to the camera’s right, soft.

## Camera settings

28–80 mm · f/1.4–f/9 · 1/250–1/25 s · ISO 100–3200 (on full-frame), inferred. From the EXIF of seven specimens: 28–80 mm eq. at f/1.4–9, mostly 1/250–1/40 s (1/4000 s wide open in sun), ISO 100–200 by day and 640–3200 on night streets; fast primes wide open for shallow focus. The grade, not the exposure, makes the style.

## Directing people

Street pictures are seldom posed: a lone figure walks away down a platform, back to the camera, leans on a rail looking at the view or crosses a street. Portraits are posed outdoors like film stills: crouching or sitting loosely, turned three-quarter or in profile, gazing off past the lens with a calm, unsmiling face, the sun behind.

## Styling

Mostly unstyled: real streets, stations, harbours and travel views as found. Portraits use a chosen outdoor place (a meadow, a park, a city verge) and the sitter's own casual or self-styled clothes (knitwear, striped tees, sunglasses, a long coat).

## Before you shoot it

The look is practised by many living photographers and sold as presets: describe its choices, never prompt with a photographer's name or copy a paid preset or someone's feed. Its street pictures show real passers-by who did not choose to be photographed; generate only invented adults and no identifiable people. The grade pushes every skin towards orange, so correct darker and paler skin on its own terms rather than letting the preset decide, and never present a generated picture as a still from a real film.

## Photographs

- Clive Varley, A Time for Experimentation, 2017. CC BY 2.0, via Flickr and Wikimedia Commons. Shown on the page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Time_for_Experimentation_(38896311835).jpg
- Gabriel Dan, Brașov, 2017. CC0, via 500px and Wikimedia Commons. Shown on the page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bra%C8%99ov_(237744223).jpeg
- Giuseppe Milo, The Last Train, Dublin, 2017. CC BY 3.0, via 500px and Wikimedia Commons. Shown on the page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Last_Train_Dublin_Ireland_Color_Street_Photography_(199005943).jpeg
- W.carter, Self-serve aisle in IKEA Torp Uddevalla (cinematic edit), photographed 2018, edited 2025. CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Shown on the page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Self-serve_aisle_in_IKEA_Torp_Uddevalla_-_Cinematic_edit.jpg
- Alfred Kalm, ReEdit, 2018. CC BY 2.0, via Flickr. Shown on the page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/151169979@N08/40401594274/
- The MJ Productions, Cold Orange, 2018. CC BY 2.0, via Flickr. Shown on the page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/themj_productions/31558813858
- Frank Schulenburg, San Francisco, Sansome and Sutter at night, 2023. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Shown on the page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:San_Francisco,_Sansome_and_Sutter_at_night-L1001271.jpg

## Sources

- Color grading, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_grading (O Brother, Where Art Thou? the first Hollywood film wholly graded digitally; 'From 2010, many films, such as Hot Tub Time Machine and Iron Man 2, began using the complementary colors orange and teal')
- Phil Hoad, Hollywood's new colour craze, The Guardian, 26 August 2010: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/aug/26/colour-grading-orange-teal-hollywood (teal backdrop and orange flesh tones in the foreground; Todd Miro's complementary-colour argument; colourist Stefan Sonnenfeld on the Transformers films; O Brother, Where Art Thou? the first digital intermediate in 2000)
- Todd Miro, Teal and Orange - Hollywood, Please Stop the Madness, Into the Abyss, 14 March 2010: http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html (flesh tones in the orange range, teal their complement; digital intermediate; Transformers 2, Iron Man 2, Hot Tub Time Machine, The Wolfman)
- Scott Kelby, Try "Cinematic Style" Cropping in Photoshop for a Wide Screen Look, scottkelby.com, around September 2010: https://scottkelby.com/try-cinematic-style-cropping-in-photoshop-for-a-wide-screen-look/ (a 2.39:1 crop ratio in Lightroom's Crop Tool, and black canvas bars to 'add the letterbox look you get with anamorphic widescreen movies'; about the crop, not the colour grade)
- Michael Zhang, How to Do Cinematic Color Grading on Your Photos with Photoshop, PetaPixel, 29 March 2015: https://petapixel.com/2015/03/29/how-to-do-cinematic-color-grading-on-your-photos-with-photoshop/ (a 'Hollywood movie' look for photographs; Curves give the dark shades a cool teal tone and the light shades a warm orange)
- Anton Gorlin, How to Create a Cinematic Lightroom Preset for Landscape Photos, PetaPixel, 13 August 2018: https://petapixel.com/2018/08/13/how-to-create-a-cinematic-lightroom-preset-for-landscape-photos/ ('lots of cinematic looks on Instagram', 'mostly cold tones with a rare spark of a warm look'; a complementary orange-blue pair whose 'muted cinematic versions of the colors' are 'Teal Blue and Burning Sand'; 'for cinematic, we don't need a lot of contrast', so the blacks are lifted towards grey and the highlights lowered to grey around an S-curve; split toning; HSL emphasising Oranges and Aquas and muting all others)
- Nathaniel Dodson, Create Cinematic Movie Still Look in Lightroom, tutvid, 26 April 2017: https://tutvid.com/lightroom/create-cinematic-movie-still-look-lightroom-tutorial ('a cinematic 2.39:1 crop to give the photo a real wide screen look'; about the crop and tones, not teal and orange)
- Jenny Edwards, Will This Editing Trend Take the Place of the Cinematic Edit?, Fstoppers, 31 July 2018: https://fstoppers.com/commercial/will-editing-trend-take-place-cinematic-edit-273952 (the cinematic edit mimics blockbuster lighting with a grade centred on complementary oranges and teals)
- Andrew Childress, How to Use The Teal and Orange Look to Color Grade Photos Using Lightroom Classic, Envato Tuts+, 15 February 2022: https://photography.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-create-the-orange-and-teal-look-in-photos-with-lightroom-classic-diy-style-preset--cms-36646 (blue shadows complement warm skin; travel photography; HSL blue and aqua shifts, Color Grading wheels, vibrance, saved as a preset)
- James Paterson, How to do colour grading: get cinematic shots, Amateur Photographer, 21 July 2025: https://amateurphotographer.com/technique/photo_editing/how-to-do-colour-grading/ (orange-teal treatment from the Camera Calibration panel; blue in the shadows while keeping skin tones; LUTs)
- Frederic Lardinois, Adobe Lightroom gets a new color grading tool, TechCrunch, 20 October 2020: https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/20/adobe-lightroom-gets-a-new-color-grading-tool-auto-versions-graphical-watermarking-and-more/ (colour wheels like a video editor's replace Split Toning)
- Color Lookup adjustment, Adobe Photoshop tutorial: https://www.adobe.com/learn/photoshop/web/edit-photo-color-lookup-adjustment (Color Lookup adjustment layer with 3DLUT presets)
- Orange & Teal, Skylum Marketplace: https://marketplace.skylum.com/luminar-presets/orange-and-teal (ten Luminar presets including 'Blockbuster', to 'make your photos look like stills from movies')
- Wikimedia Commons, Category:Orange and teal and Category:Cinematic style photography: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Orange_and_teal, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Cinematic_style_photography (photographs captioned or tagged as teal-and-orange or #cinematic edits; the cinematic category is broad, with two-strip Technicolor imitations, fog pictures and faded portraits, so a #cinematic tag alone is not taken as evidence of this style)
- Jeff Collier, How to Get The Teal and Orange Look (LUTs & Photos), Shotkit, undated: https://shotkit.com/teal-orange-look/ (the look is 'known by different names, such as the blockbuster look due to its high popularity in Hollywood'; human skin tones 'fall somewhere within the orange spectrum')
- A Time for Experimentation (Clive Varley), Brașov (Gabriel Dan), The Last Train Dublin (Giuseppe Milo), Self-serve aisle in IKEA Torp Uddevalla - Cinematic edit (W.carter) and San Francisco, Sansome and Sutter at night (Frank Schulenburg), Wikimedia Commons (EXIF): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Last_Train_Dublin_Ireland_Color_Street_Photography_(199005943).jpeg (Nikon D90 57 mm eq. f/4.8 1/250 s ISO 200; Canon 1200D 67 mm eq. f/9 1/250 s ISO 100; Fujifilm X-Pro2 35 mm eq. f/1.4 1/60 s ISO 640; Sony RX100 28 mm eq. f/1.8 1/40 s ISO 125; Leica M11 35 mm f/2.8 1/40 s ISO 3200)
- Alfred Kalm, ReEdit, Flickr, EXIF page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/151169979@N08/40401594274/meta/ (Canon EOS 760D, EF50mm f/1.8 STM at 50 mm, f/2.0, 1/4000 s, ISO 100; taken 29 July 2017; Lightroom 6.12)
- The MJ Productions, Cold Orange, Flickr, EXIF page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/themj_productions/31558813858/meta/ (Canon EOS 1200D, 50 mm, f/1.8, 1/160 s, ISO 100, +1 EV; taken 11 October 2018; Lightroom 4.2)

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From Lumogeny (https://lumogeny.com/), a service of Van Riel Online Services. The shoot sheet for your own camera, lenses and lights is on the page: https://lumogeny.com/styles/teal-orange-cinematic/#sheet