While I’m certainly not an expert in these things, I’ve taken just enough art classes to understand the concept of complementary colors and how the human eye processes them, and I read just enough about film to recognize digital color correction used to set tone and mood, especially in the last decade or so. This sort of color correction has been around a while; The Matrix was all shades of green; Blade was almost completely desaturated of color, except for vibrant reds, and the Underworld series is almost totally blue. Much of the time, it’s very effective, adding additional layers of atmosphere to the experience of watching a film, especially a film portraying a hyper-real world, such as in the films I just mentioned.

Of course, there can be too much of a good thing. Take Auto-tune, a bit of pitch correction software that lets record producers fix bum notes – it’s been around for a long time, used unobtrusively to shave off the rough edges of a performance and make your CDs sound better. But, after a bit of innovative experimentation on a Cher tune in ’98, now it’s ubiquitous – nearly everybody uses it, and seems to us exactly the same software settings: once you know what you’re listening for, you can’t not hear it. It’s gone from innovative to cliche.

Color correction is the same way; everybody’s using it, but they’re all using it in exactly the same manner. Almost every film, every piece of visual media out there, is orange and blue.

This started out as an interesting use of color theory; the idea being that human skin tones exist mostly within the orange range, and opposite orange on the color wheel is the blue/teal range. With human flesh tones being the focus of almost every frame of film in almost any live-action color film ever shot, digitally tweaking the palate to highlight the oranges and blues and mute other shades, the subjects on-screen “pop”, drawing the eye the way an uncorrected image wouldn’t. However, what started out as an interesting trick has quickly become overdone.

This effect, in moderation, is interesting and eye catching (hell, I used it unconsciously in the color palate on this site!). Run unchecked and rampant, its Transformers 2:

Now, go forth into the world and try to not see this. I dare you.