Eli5: How exactly movie directors get the ‘hue’ they want for the movie?

Question

How do they do that?

In: Other

Answer 1

The other answers aren’t really for 5 year olds so I’ll give it a go…

Think of a colouring in book…

The crew film the black and white outline of the picture.
(shoot in a format that would be really washed out if you looked at it.)

Then the colourist/editor does the colouring in.
(The footage looks washed out and almost black and white when they get it, but the image contains a lot of information about the actual colours filmed, and the colourist uses software to manipulate this information until they get the look required.)

Now for a 15 year old:

The format used is usually a form of LOG format… Think of it like RAW from a stills camera.

RAW looks a lot less vibrant than say a JPEG that you might take with your phone… But if you want to manipulate your JPEG, there is only so much you can do before the whites are too white, or you introduce noise, or the colours get muddy.

With RAW or LOG, the image looks flat and boring, but you can manipulate so much more than a JPEG, so you can make all sorts of style of image because the format contains so much more information about the difference between all of the details of the image than a JPEG does.

Now for a 20 year old:

Basically a video version of Photoshop. Cheers.