Comment by the_af
2 days ago
There's a pretty good video on YouTube (more than one, actually) that explains how careless use of HDR in modern cinema is destroying the look and feel of cinema we used to like.
Everything is flattened, contrast is eliminated, lights that should be "burned white" for a cinematic feel are brought back to "reasonable" brightness with HDR, really deep blacks are turned into flat greys, etc. The end result is the flat and washed out look of movies like Wicked. It's often correlated to CGI-heavy movies, but in reality it's starting to affect every movie.
The washed out grey thing was an error that became a style!
Because HDR wasn’t natively supported on most displays and software, for a long time it was just “hacked in there” by squashing the larger dynamic range into a smaller one using a mathematical transform, usually a log function. When viewed without the inverse transform this looks horribly grey and unsaturated.
Directors and editors would see this aesthetic day in, day out, with the final color grade applied only after a long review process.
Some of them got used to it and even liking it, and now here we are: horribly washed out movies made to look like that on purpose.
What you said, it's definitely become a style. But, also, a lot of these movies that look like ass on Joe Public's OOGLAMG $130 85" Black Friday TV in his brightly-lit living room actually look awesome if your entire setup is proper, real HDR devices and software, your screen has proper OLED or local dimming, is calibrated to within an inch of its life etc, and you view them in a dark home theater.
True! But I think that movies adapted for TV must be made for the average "good quality" screen, not the state of the art that almost nobody owns. At least they should look decent enough in a good quality (but not top-notch) setup.
Also, the YouTube video I'm thinking of singles out Wicked as seen in movie theaters. The image "as intended" looks washed out and without contrast.
The transition from Avengers to the later movies is very noticeable, and one of the worst offenders since source material really speaks against the choice.