Comment by crazygringo

The data in the article is either not representative or didn't go back far enough.

The best example, cars, only goes back to 1990. And the museum objects are objects a science museum happened to keep, that go back to 1800? Hardly representative of consumer objects in general. There isn't even a single chart about clothing.

Glancing through historical clothing and car magazines from the past century is going to tell you a lot more.

If you look closely, there's actually an increase of red, green, blue, etc. at the same time as the increase in black and white, and it's the brownish colors of undyed organic materials that are decreasing. (Or maybe they were originally dyed and the color faded over the last 200 years.)

Whereas before you might've been limited to a choice of lighter or darker wood for your furniture, now you can have it in any synthetic color you want, including pure black and pure white.

> You would expect an explosion of color in the 1960s and then a decrease

The data shows an explosion of "new" colours in the 1960s, although the trend never stopped. Technology is still no doubt the answer – including the explosion in the black to white spectrum. We aren't limited to natural colours or colours, period, like we once were.

The big difference between 1800s and the 1960s is that oil paints were mixed “onsite” for color and the the 1960s had the commcerialization of latex paints and Pantone colors.

I should mention that the Bauhaus (1920s)broke out color theory as separate from graphics representation.

Geocities were explosion of color.

Also, pop art.

> You would expect an explosion of color in the 1960s and then a decrease

What happened was a lot of muted colors, earthy yellows, browns, and oranges in the 70s followed by an insane amount of the brightest colors possible in the late 80s and early 90s where fluorescent blues greens and pinks were everywhere. It seems like everything got a lot more bland after that and we've never recovered to happy medium.

I'm going to change your first example. Can you see what stands out?

"00000000qq000000000I0000000"

Now I'm going to change your second example, also by three characters. Can you see what stands out?

"H90F3iJsjo$(4ORma1sSKX@)!2k"

Is that a clearer example of what I'm trying to say? In the second example, because every symbol stands out, no symbol stands out. Or to put it more technically, noise has overwhelmed any signal.

I would describe it more as noise... When there are loud, clashing color patterns everywhere, it all turns into noise and nothing really stands out. It's like watching analog TV with poor reception... there's stuff there, but really hard to make out or focus.

I'm with GP on this, I'd prefer most things be somewhat subdued and letting key pieces come out. The subdued doesn't have to expressly be a shade of gray or brown/tan either.

> Its a sentence that seems meaningful, but actually is not.

It's perfectly meaningful. When everything is colourful you can't use colour to stand out. It's very simple. Obvious even.

The drained-color thing is exclusive to a certain type of TV/movie drama, and then also a serious technical problem involving HDR device-side (which is a whole other story).

But if you watch any comedy, or reality show, or plenty of "normal" dramas, on a regular TV, the color is normal.

However, yes, there has been a certain trend involving Christopher Nolan, "gritty realism", and legal-political-military-crime themes, to do color grading to massively reduce saturation and aggressively push towards blue. I don't like it much but you can also just not watch that stuff. It's stylistic the same way film noir was. Some people hated that back in the day too, now it's just seen as a style of the time.

> color grades the shit out of color

Color grading itself isn't the problem. It's just a creative tool that can be used well or poorly. The problem is the intentional stylistic choices being made with the tool. I don't have strong opinions about TFAs arguments re: color in general but as someone deep into cinema production technology, there's a troubling lack of visual diversity in modern cinema and it's not just color, it's dynamic range and texture too.

It's crazy because this is happening in an era when digital cinema workflows from cameras to file formats to post-production allow everyone to capture, manipulate and distribute visuals with unprecedented levels of fidelity and dynamic range. Even DSLRs down to $3000 can capture full frame 4k camera raw with >14 stops of dynamic range which is insane. The great cinematographers of the past needed incredible skill to capture dynamic range from deep shadows to punchy highlights on film and it was always a risk since they had to wait for dailies. And they had little latitude to manipulate the image captured on the camera negative in post.

Today's imagers, formats and tools make capturing immense dynamic range not only fast and easy but cheap and virtually risk-free yet so much cinema looks flat and boring - and there's no technical reason for it. This video shows compelling examples contrasting recent movies with those shot on film in the 90s but also movies shot on much less capable digital cinema cameras in the early 2000s proving it's not digital or grading that's driving this. "Why don't movies look like movies any more?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTUM9cFeSo.

According to Hollywood cinematographers in the video it's partly intentional artistic choices, part the impact of composing and lighting for HDR, part lack of creativity and production skill and a big part over focus on flat lighting for VFX shots (because the more expressive the digital camera negative is, the harder it is for VFX teams to match with CGI). I'd add another factor which is that younger cinematographers, LDs and camera ops who learned on high dynamic range digital cinema cameras have been trained to shoot a flat LUT. While this technically maximizes the latitude available for color grading in post (which is generally a good thing), the issue is that many extend this to composing and lighting shots that have virtually no expressive look in the captured digital negative at all. Color grading in post should be for small tweaks, conforming shot-to-shot variance, mastering and, occasionally, saving the day when something goes wrong with a shot. While modern editing and grading tools are immensely powerful, re-framing and grading in post cannot substitute for creative on-set lighting, lensing, composition and exposure choices. Great cinematographers still create their looks with lighting, lens and camera as if there were going to be no grading in post. Unfortunately, this seems to increasingly be an under-valued skill.

The requirements of modern VFX also contribute in an indirect way as well. It takes on-set time and energy for the camera teams to capture and check the increasingly complex list of clean plates, reflection map spheres and color/contrast references with specialized LUTs and metadata at a variety of apertures for every shot. This takes time away from traditional lighting and composition and ultimately producers don't budget enough time. When something has to give - it's not going to be the VFX plates. In modern effects-heavy productions, the VFX director always has a team on-set for every shot verifying they're getting what they need. While this is necessary and understandable, unfortunately, the reverse is rarely true. The cinematographer is not supervising the lighting and composition of all the major VFX elements because they are being produced by a dozen different vendors over a year-long post-production cycle. This can still work when you have a director like a James Cameron who's hands-on throughout the process and has top-notch VFX director and cinematography skills. But that's not the norm. This creates systemic incentives for directors, cinematographers and LDs to lens flat, unexpressive shots. Because if there's not consistent, hand-on creative direction over the whole process, the editor and colorist are left trying to stitch together a bunch of shots and elements that weren't created to exist cohesively in the same frame. I suspect not managing this complexity is how visual disasters like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania happen.

Sadly, there's no reason it has to be this way. Technically, it's entirely possible to create a VFX-heavy movie that looks like every part of every frame was lensed by a master like Bernardo Bertolucci. There's nothing required that's even that hard or expensive compared to modern VFX blockbuster complexity or budgets. I think the reason we haven't seen it yet is two-fold: today's top producers, directors and cinematographers rarely have the new and diverse skill sets required in one person and none of the few with the skills and experience has had both the creative intention and budget to do it. I'm actually hopeful that maybe in the next few years someone like a Nolan or Cameron will decide to try to take it to this level as an aspiration. Currently, many of those with the budgets and cred are choosing to address the challenge by reverting to creating effects with practical sets and in-camera techniques. This can avoid the problem but it's looking backward instead of embracing the challenge and doing the pioneering work of figuring out how to push through and solve it. Whoever does it may discover all-new creative and expressive capabilities.

> we're all just cognitively exhausted?

If you include electronic media as a source of this cognitive exhaustion, then I'm with you. If greyscale dominates the physical environment, then it's a reaction to something equally pervasive.

I think the sensory load idea is productive, but I'd add a related idea of drawing attention to key things only.

I don't care if my kettle looks "professional"; one is pink, another is orange.

But I prefer walls around me to be white or very lightly colored, not, say, intensively red. That would constantly distract me.

Code in my editor is colorful like a Christmas tree, bur most of the interface is muted beige and green. This is about certain things requiring my attention, and others sparing it.

When everything is loud, nothing is, nothing stands out. Bold colors often work better as accents.

(Sometimes it's about non-aesthetic considerations. I prefer my car to be approximately white to soak in less of the hot summer summer sun.)

> cognitively exhausted?

i find it cognitively exhausting to watch movies that are so dark that most times i cannot even see the eye color of the cast

I don't hate the wall art in your example... it's not quite my taste, but it doesn't make me pull my hair out. If you look at something like the link below, I'd hate having to be anywhere near it. Busy patterns and mixes of color just feel like noise and give me (sometimes literally) a headache.

https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/vintage-bathroom-makeover-p...

> I wish the inflationary trend in linguistic overstatement did the same.

Nowadays literally everything I read is the most egregious overstatement I've ever seen.

> I bet one of those color comparison graphs of the average website in 1998 through today would show the same trend.

    <marquee><blink>Indeed</blink></marquee>

Pretty much every retail store is like this. I mean, it's been this way for a while, but there is so much loud colorful advertizing that having a quiet place to live in feels much better.

> If the environment is continually shouting at you it's hard to hear the whispers, where the meaning is.

So do we currently live lives completely devoid of meaning? That's certainly what it feels like. That's certainly what the color schemes available to us connote.

So much fear of meaning we remove all meaning from our environment....

Isn't all that art faded out, though? I wouldn't be surprised if Baroque period art was originally painted with riotous color first and then faded over time to where it now looks merely like an "opinionated use of color".

In a similar vein, all those old grey marble statues the Greeks and Romans made used to be bathed in riotous color before the paint flaked off.

Even if it's in one's own living space it's possible to not get used to something. In those cases, for those types of personalities, it'll usually get replaced or painted over. One thing I completely abhor are busy tile patterns, it can be the shapes or colors, and no, I wouldn't get used to it.

In terms of the colors of the world... I'm fine with nature... it's the man-made that gets to be garish at times.

I don't think we stopped doing it because it's gimmicky.

Recordings in the 1960s were mixed to be played back on stereo speakers. You can hard pan stuff and in your living room where you listen to it, it will produce a nice pleasant stereo image because each ear can hear some of both speakers.

Today, audio engineers mix music to be listened to primarily on headphones. If you pan something hard left, it's literally not going to be heard in the right ear at all which sounds horrifically artificial.

So now music has to be mixed to synthetize a pleasant soundstage when heard on headphones.

IIRC, the Beatles “Sgt. Pepper” album was among the first stereo-mixed albums released. As much fame as that particular album has, the original mix is really bad. Drums all left, guitars all right, nothing in the center. It sounds weird to modern ears!

Also IIRC, I believe George Harrison’s kid remixed it properly, just a handful of years ago.

Even worse is when they keep screwing with the panning. I can't stand Led Zeppelin II for that reason. Someone just couldn't stop messing with the damn slider, right in the middle of songs. The ones with merely bad, but static, panning are far more tolerable.

Because the analog equipment back then could only do binary panning.

I dunno, I think the purple and white is quite in line with the degree to which Taco Bell food represents Mexican culture and food.

I agree. I'd even say it embodies optimism.

Are you young? I've noticed the upcoming generation has begun rejecting their parent's bland aesthetics.

Same.

Sensory overload argument is particularly painful here, because it's essentially saying that the one thing you and me want to look colorful - the entertainment we choose - is doomed to be washed out because the stuff we don't want to see - advertising - has to overdo stimulus to catch attention.

As an Indian living in a western European country - I very much prefer the gray/ neutral colors here. I always found the excessive and ugly use of color in India overwhelming. Though, I agree, a bit of more colors in winter wear would be nice.

I don't know about that... the 70s is called "the decade that taste forgot" for a reason...

I don't think anyone would argue the point of cars is to look pretty or make the environment more balanced. Cars are successful in spite of looking like shit and damaging the environment.

Jungles are actually a great example. They are mostly neutral browns and dark greens that form a pretty neutral background... with the occasional beautiful bright accent colors from a bird or flower or something. But if you trek through the jungle, it's pretty boring color-wise most of the time. Which is why spotting a colorful bird is such a joy.

But can you please take the personal attacks elsewhere? HN is not the place for those.