Neo-Noir

Neo-noir takes the shadow scheme of noir into colour, and the colour carries a second meaning. Neon is a light that somebody paid for, so a face lit by it is a face lit by commerce.

It also loosens the period. Noir belongs to the nineteen forties, and neo-noir can be any decade, which is why it keeps being made.

Keep the noir contrast and change only the palette. One hard source, heavy shadow, and saturated colour arriving from signs, screens or practical lamps inside the frame.

Wet streets are doing the same job they did in black and white. A reflective ground doubles every sign and gives the lower half of the frame something to be.

Colour separation is what makes it read. A cyan or magenta key against a warm practical is the usual scheme, and holding two colours apart matters more than which two you choose.

Use it for modern crime, for a city at night, and for a character whose choices have gone bad in an interesting way.

Skip it for daylight and for anything wholesome. The palette signals moral trouble, so it undercuts a scene that has none.

Film noir is black and white and lit by a lamp. Neo-noir is colour and usually lit by a sign. If the image is monochrome, the name is noir.

Tech noir is the narrower case where the light comes from machines and screens in a near future. Neo-noir can be set now, with no technology in the frame at all.

Roman Polanski shot Chinatown (1974) largely in Los Angeles daylight and kept the noir structure underneath, which showed that the genre could survive the loss of the shadows. Ridley Scott went the other way in Blade Runner (1982), where rain, neon and searchlight beams rebuild the noir key out of coloured sources.

The model gives you a colourful night city with even light. Neon on its own is not the look. Ask for hard shadow alongside the neon, and say most of the frame stays dark.

The second failure is black and white. If the prompt leans hard on noir, models reach for monochrome. Say the image is in colour and name the two colours you want separated.