Styles / Digital & social

Teal-and-orange cinematic look

2010–present. The complementary grade of Hollywood blockbusters after the digital intermediate. Also called Orange and teal or Teal and orange grade.

Where the lights stand

Key: a large soft source, 60 cm, 2900 K, 1.1 m from the face, about 50° to the camera’s left, 22 cm above the eyes.
Edge: a large soft source, 30 × 80 cm, 12000 K, 97 cm from the face, behind, at the camera’s right, 27 cm above the eyes.
Background: a large soft source, 50 cm, 12000 K, 1 m from the face, beside the subject, at the camera’s right, 47 cm above the eyes.

To scale, from the render’s scene file. One way to get this light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.

Render of a grey clay head. A warm key on the face against a cooler, darker background, with a cool edge from behind. — Rendered with this plan. A warm key on the face against a cooler, darker background, with a cool edge from behind.

Render: a synthetic clay head made with MakeHuman, not a person, in Blender Cycles, 85 mm, f/5.6.

A Time for Experimentation, by Clive Varley, 2 March 2017 — A Time for Experimentation

Clive Varley, A Time for Experimentation, 2017. CC BY 2.0, via Flickr and Wikimedia Commons. Source: A Time for Experimentation at Wikimedia Commons (from Flickr)

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.

Shoot sheet for your kit The photographs

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.

Shoot sheet for your kit

Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.

Step 1

Light

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.

Low sun: shoot near sunrise or sunset.
Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.
Leave the lamps’ own colour in: do not correct sodium orange, tungsten amber or fluorescent green.

Shadow edges: Shadows that fade gradually from light to dark, cast by a large or diffused light: a window, a softbox, a cloudy sky.
Shadow depth: Dark shadows that still hold some detail (a high lighting ratio, about 4:1 to 8:1: the shadow side two to three stops darker). Shadows kept light and full of detail by a reflector, a fill light, bounce or bright surroundings (a low lighting ratio, up to about 3:1: the shadow side at most a stop and a half darker).

How the style 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.

This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. The set-up at the top of the page is the one we rendered, to scale. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.

Step 2

Lens and settings

Start at

50 mmf/41/125 sISO 800

On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.

Then: 28–80 mm · f/1.4–f/9 · 1/250–1/25 s · ISO 100–3200 on full frame, inferred from the gear and the look. 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.
White balance: Raw on auto or daylight white balance; the split is pushed in the grade, with low sun and lamps left orange and shade, sky and LED light swung teal (inferred).

Focus: One plane sharp, the rest melting into blur and bokeh.
Angle: The camera at the height of a standing person or of the subject.
Depth: Separate events in the foreground, middle ground and background.

Step 3

Direct

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.

Body position: Caught or posed in mid-step, one foot lifted, clothes swinging.
Turn to the camera: Seen from behind, facing into the scene, so the viewer looks with them.
Head & gaze: Eyes off the frame, past the camera or into the distance, as if lost in thought.
Without a pose: No people at all, or people so small or far off that their pose does not read (hands alone are Hands alone).
The moment: People photographed as they are, unaware or unconcerned.

Step 4

Style the set

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).

Set & props: A real place picked for its look as the setting for a shoot, not the subjects’ own: a street, a field, a palace, a hotel room.
How much is styled: Nothing dressed, made up, moved or added for the picture.

Step 5

Finish

Colour: Warm skin against teal shadows, as in film grading. Strong, dense colours.
Digital & other: A modern digital camera: clean, detailed, neutral.
Texture: Smooth tones with no visible grain.
Post-production: A ready-made grade laid over the whole image.
Shown in: Pictures made for a scrolling feed.

Stay away from overcast & flat daylight, direct on-camera flash, high-key, pastel, black & white, full range, straight print, shadowless, flat form, photo gestures and neutral, true colour.

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.

Photographs that define it

From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.

Brașov, by Gabriel Dan, 12 November 2017 — Brașov

Gabriel Dan, Brașov, 2017. CC0, via 500px and Wikimedia Commons. Source: Brașov at Wikimedia Commons (imported from 500px by the Archive Team)

The Last Train Dublin Ireland Color Street Photography, by Giuseppe Milo, 17 February 2017 — The Last Train Dublin Ireland Color Street Photography

Giuseppe Milo, The Last Train, Dublin, 2017. CC BY 3.0, via 500px and Wikimedia Commons. Source: The Last Train Dublin Ireland Color Street Photography at Wikimedia Commons (imported from 500px by the Archive Team)

Self-serve aisle in IKEA Torp Uddevalla - Cinematic edit, by W.carter, 6 May 2018 — Self-serve aisle in IKEA Torp Uddevalla - Cinematic edit

W.carter, Self-serve aisle in IKEA Torp Uddevalla (cinematic edit), photographed 2018, edited 2025. CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Source: Self-serve aisle in IKEA Torp Uddevalla - Cinematic edit at Wikimedia Commons

ReEdit, by Alfred Kalm, 29 July 2017 — ReEdit

Alfred Kalm, ReEdit, 2018. CC BY 2.0, via Flickr. Source: ReEdit at Flickr

Cold Orange, by The MJ Productions, 11 October 2018 — Cold Orange

The MJ Productions, Cold Orange, 2018. CC BY 2.0, via Flickr. Source: Cold Orange at Flickr

San Francisco, Sansome and Sutter at night, by Frank Schulenburg, 18 January 2023 — San Francisco, Sansome and Sutter at night

Frank Schulenburg, San Francisco, Sansome and Sutter at night, 2023. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Source: San Francisco, Sansome and Sutter at night at Wikimedia Commons

With other styles

The opposite: VSCO film-preset look. Both are preset grades for a feed, and both can lift the blacks and let the shadows drift towards teal; but VSCO holds every colour back to imitate a faded film stock, while teal and orange makes the warm-against-cool split the point of the picture and mutes the rest, even in its matte version; pick one grade per feed.

Pairs with Staged tableau photography. Light a scene like a tableau at dusk, fading daylight against warm lamps, and the teal-and-orange grade only has to be nudged instead of forced.

The opposite: New Color photography. New Color keeps the real colours of an ordinary place; the teal-and-orange grade replaces them with two, so use New Color's restraint when the true colour of a place matters.

The opposite: Hollywood glamour portraiture. Both borrow from the movies: glamour sculpts the face with one hard key light in black and white, while this look takes its light from the location or mixed lamps and lets the colour grade carry the drama.

The opposite: E-commerce packshot on white. Keep the grade off product images: it turns whites teal and pushes warm materials orange, so use it only for lifestyle and campaign pictures.

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)