Cool Blue

Cold reads as distance, as early morning, as institutions and as money. A blue frame puts the audience outside the scene rather than inside it, which is why so many thrillers and procedurals live here.

It also takes the life out of skin, and that is usually the point. A face under a blue grade looks tired, or ill, or simply unreachable.

Blue enters the shadows first and works up through the midtones. Highlights stay closest to white, so the picture keeps somewhere clean to look at and does not turn into one flat sheet of colour.

The decision that matters is skin. Let the skin hold a trace of warmth and the shot reads as a cold room with a person in it. Push the skin blue as well and the person joins the grade, which is stronger and far less flattering.

Fluorescent tubes, north-facing daylight and screens all lean blue on their own. A cold grade laid over that light agrees with what is already in the room.

Use it on night, on early morning, on hospitals and offices, and on any scene that should feel watched rather than lived in.

Leave it alone when you want the audience close to somebody. Cold light puts distance between the viewer and the face, and performance struggles to close it again.

Teal and orange holds the skin warm on purpose and pushes only the background and the shadows cold. The two colours fight each other, and that fight is the whole look.

Cool blue moves the entire frame one way, with nothing held back to contrast against. If the faces are noticeably warmer than everything around them, you are looking at teal and orange.

Steven Soderbergh gives the Ohio and Washington thread of Traffic (2000) a hard blue cast, shot with a filter and a cold balance, while the Mexico scenes run amber. The two grades let the film cut between its stories without a caption.

Skin is where this goes wrong. A bare request for a cool blue grade usually returns blue faces, which reads as a corpse rather than as a cold room. Say whether the skin keeps any warmth in it.

The second failure is a frame with no white left anywhere. Ask for the highlights to stay near clean, or the image becomes one blue sheet with nothing to anchor the eye.