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Cinecolor LUT

The orange and blue look of the mid 2000's, from the 1930's.

This LUT set simulates Cinecolor's subtractive 2-colour process, used from 1932 to 1950, mostly in short films and in Fleischer Studios cartoons. A few features were shot and printed in Cinecolor, including Scared to Death, Bella Lugosi's only colour appearance.

The Cinecolor corporation bought Multicolor when it went out of business. Cinecolor was cheap to shoot and print, so it was low end-alternative to Technicolor's 3-colour process. Original prints were grainy, with one colour sharper than the other (depending on the projectionist) with horrible soundtracks (optical and printed blue, which didn't work well for black calibrated projectors).

Despite all that, Cinecolor produces beautifully imperfect orange and blue images, with brownish greens, no magentas and greenish blacks.

Is this a vintage look when hardly any recognizable films were made with it? As I'm working through recreating all these two and three colour processes, I'm finding they are compacting what I accept as my visual palette. The limitations of using two colours to build an image – but to also produce good blacks, whites and skin tones – is getting me closer to the heart of filmmaking and away from serving all the technology that digital has wrought upon us. New shows shot on the biggest and baddest log-encoded 6K and 8K cameras seem too sharp, too colour faithfull, and just too much of the wrong thing, and thin on what makes cinema for me: grain, motion blur, deep rich colour, softness, and moments.

Give yourself and cinema a chance to play again. Try out some of these LUTs and play.

This LUT can be though of as a colour transformation processes. It isn't designed with specific cameras in mind, or to transform log-encoded footage. It digitally applies the colour transform process that colour and density would go through in a Cinecolor process.

Apply the LUT using your favourite LUT utility. Comes as a 3D 32-bit LUT, so it works in all LUT situations like Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, monitors and even iPhone/Android apps.

The LUT comes as a zip file and includes the following:

Cinecolor 1932-1950