Palette

A restricted palette turns colour into a label. Once two or three colours repeat, the audience starts reading them, and a change of palette can announce a new place or a new state without a word of dialogue.

It also makes a frame look designed. Removing colours is the fastest way to make a picture feel controlled, because everything left in it looks chosen.

Pick the colours first and remove everything else. The set works best small, at two or three hues, with the rest of the frame pushed toward neutral so the chosen colours have nowhere to hide.

The work happens in the art department as much as in the grade. Walls, costume and props inside the palette are easy to hold. A stray colour that was never meant to be there has to be graded out shot by shot.

Repetition is what makes it read. One green frame is a green frame. Green returning across a sequence becomes a rule the audience learns.

Use it when a film moves between worlds, when a state of mind has to be marked, and on any piece where a poster or a brand has to survive being described.

Skip it on a scene that should feel found. A restricted palette is visible, and documentary or naturalistic drama pays for it.

Split toning puts one hue in the shadows and another in the highlights, so the split follows brightness and applies to everything in the frame at once.

A palette follows objects. A red coat stays red in shadow and in light, and the wall behind it stays neutral in both. If the colour depends on how bright a thing is, the grade is split toning.

Steven Soderbergh gives each of the three stories in Traffic (2000) a colour, so a cut to amber or to blue says which thread the film is on. Zhang Yimou goes further in Hero (2002), where each retelling of the same events carries a palette of its own and the change of colour is the change of account.

Bare words such as restricted palette leave the choice to the model, which usually returns teal and orange. Name the two or three colours you want.

The second failure is a frame where the chosen colours drown in everything else. Say that anything outside the palette reads neutral.