Short answer
On the productions with a published record, a great deal of it. Sets were painted, costumes chosen, backings altered and lamps gelled to put the colour in front of the lens, and the laboratory or the grade then reinforced or restrained it. The record also shows the reverse case, where a colourist deliberately held back so that design could carry the picture. What follows is drawn only from what makers and trade sources have put on record about each title.
The green of The Matrix is the clearest documented case. Production designer Owen Paterson built the simulated world's sets with very dark green walls, and the painted backings outside its windows were changed to show white skies instead of blue. Green filters were used on some shots and green was added in the timing, but the timing was working with a set that was already green. On Suspiria, Giuseppe Bassan's textured, geometric, coloured surfaces gave the saturated light something to strike. In both, the later stages amplified a decision the art department had already made.
The red Las Vegas of Blade Runner 2049 is often described as a grade. Roger Deakins's account locates it in the lighting: filter packs were made for the production combining a pink gel with an orange one, with amber gels on other fixtures, and he describes the combination as giving the image an overall red look. Luciano Tovoli lit Suspiria through frames of coloured velvet and tissue placed in front of arc lamps close to the actors. Light coloured at the source wraps around faces and falls off across a room in a way a grade applied to the whole frame cannot imitate.
Design has always answered to the recording medium. On The Wizard of Oz, shiny surfaces were a problem for three-strip photography: the Tin Man's suit, the prop emeralds and the sequinned slippers threw reflections that had to be managed. On Roma, shot in colour for a black-and-white release, set colours were chosen for the grey they would become. Some reds and blues went dark quickly, and floor tiles that were yellowish in the real house rendered too light, so a greenish colour replaced them. The colour of an object and its job in the picture are separate things.
The Fellowship of the Ring shows a scheme split by department. The Shire's golds and greens were a matter of sunshine and minimal filtration, to keep the greens saturated. Rivendell's autumnal character was built into Grant Major's sets and lit with lavender-blue ambience at night. The Mines of Moria were desaturated in the digital grade, a decision the cinematographer says was taken early. Costume was designed with each location's scheme in view. The grade was planned from the outset as one tool among several, not as the place where the palette would be invented.
The colourist of House of the Dragon describes its grade as more neutral than that of the earlier series set in the same world, so that the richness of the costumes and sets could show. Costume colour there carries information, marking a character's house, and the dragons were given distinct colours so that an audience can tell them apart. A strong grade would have pulled those colours towards one another. Restraint in the suite is a design decision too, and a reminder that a muted or a saturated screen image does not reveal on its own which department made it so.
| Production | Aspect | What the record says | Voice |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Wizard of Oz (1939) | Design and costume | Shiny surfaces were a photographic problem: the Tin Man's suit, the prop emeralds and the sequinned red slippers all threw distracting reflections. | Production record |
| Suspiria (1977) | Design and costume | Giuseppe Bassan's sets supplied textured backgrounds, geometric shapes and coloured surfaces for the light to work against. | Production record |
| The Matrix (1999) | Design and costume | Production designer Owen Paterson built Matrix sets with very dark green walls, and the painted backings outside windows were altered to show white skies instead of blue. | Production record |
| The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) | Design and costume | Grant Major's Rivendell sets carried floral and leaf patterns, and Ngila Dickson's costumes were designed with each location's scheme. | Production record |
| Roma (2018) | Design and costume | Set colours were chosen for their grey value. Some reds and blues went dark quickly, and floor tiles that were yellowish in the real house rendered too light, so a greenish colour was used instead. | Production record |
| House of the Dragon (season one) (2022) | Design and costume | Costume colour marks which house a character belongs to, and the dragons were given distinct colours so that they can be told apart. | Production record |
| Production | Route | Colourwise's reading |
|---|---|---|
| The Wizard of Oz (1939) | Three-strip Technicolor; Kansas scenes black-and-white, printed sepia | The record is of a production organised around the demands of a colour process: light, heat, camera supply and reflective surfaces. It says nothing measured about how saturated the release prints were, and surviving copies have been through restoration and transfer. |
| The Red Shoes (1948) | Technicolor, photographed by Jack Cardiff | A cinematographer's own recollection, decades later, of using two colour treatments inside one film. It documents an intention and a method; it is not evidence of what any given print or transfer looks like. |
| The Godfather (1972) | Colour negative, deliberately underexposed and push-processed; photochemical timing | The clearest record here of a look fixed in the negative so that timing could not undo it. The interview dates from the shoot, so it states intent; later restorations and video masters were timed by other hands. |
| Suspiria (1977) | Colour negative; dye-transfer prints by Technicolor Rome | Colour made at three points, light, set and print, with the laboratory changing its own routine for the film. The account is a recollection given more than thirty years later, and the dye-transfer prints it describes are not what a streamed copy shows. |
| Se7en (1995) | Colour negative, pushed and flashed; silver-retention show prints | A print-stage look: the treatment was applied to selected prints, so the version most people have seen is a later transfer made to resemble them. The two sources agree on the laboratory and the kind of process; only the archive entry gives the name and the silver figure. |
| Pleasantville (1998) | Colour negative; scanned at 2K; colour removed and restored digitally; film-out | An early feature finished almost wholly as data, for a reason no laboratory could serve: colour and monochrome in the same frame. The priority claim is the trade press's at the time and is worded narrowly. |
| Saving Private Ryan (1998) | Colour negative, pushed and flashed; ENR prints; altered lenses and shutter | The desaturated war-film look is here the sum of five separate interventions, only one of them a laboratory process. Attributing it to bleach bypass alone misreads the record. |
| The Matrix (1999) | Colour negative; filtration, set colour and photochemical timing; some dye-transfer prints | The green was built into sets and backings and reinforced in timing; it was not a digital grade. Later home-video masters have been regraded more than once, so the strength of the green in a given copy says little about the 1999 prints. |
| O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) | Colour negative; scanned at 2K; digital grade; film-out | The usual example of what a digital intermediate could do that a bath could not: change one hue range. The same article names Pleasantville as earlier, so it is a first of a kind, not the first digitised feature. |
| The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) | Super 35 colour negative; digitally graded throughout; film prints | Location palettes were divided between lighting, design and the grade, and the cinematographer says which decision was taken where. It records choices, not values: no source gives the amount of desaturation. |
| The Aviator (2004) | Film origination; digital intermediate emulating two-colour and three-strip Technicolor | A digital grade used to quote older colour processes, and a reminder that a look approved on one output did not survive transfer to another. The account is retrospective and does not say how the emulations were built. |
| Blade Runner 2049 (2017) | Digital capture, open gate; on-set lookup table; digital grade | A colour often credited to the grade is documented as lighting. The article does not cover the HDR master, so nothing here applies to that version. |
| The Vault (2017) | Digital capture; ACES colour management through post-production | Included as a documented ACES production of modest size. The source records the pipeline and says nothing at all about the film's palette, so none is given here. |
| Roma (2018) | Large-format digital colour capture; monochrome made in the grade; SDR and HDR masters | A black-and-white film whose record is full of colour decisions, in the set and in the grade. It shows colour capture being kept as selection data even where no colour reaches the screen. |
| The Irishman (2019) | Mixed film and digital capture; one emulation lookup table per period | Emulation lookup tables used as structure: the stock names describe a target, not the material the film was shot on. The descriptions of each look are the cinematographer's words, not measurements. |
| House of the Dragon (season one) (2022) | Large-format digital capture; single show lookup table; HDR-first grade | A documented case of HDR as the master and SDR as the derivative, and of a grade deliberately stepping back in favour of design. The article does not name the HDR delivery format. |
| Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) | 35 mm and digital capture; emulation lookup tables by story phase; printer-light dailies | Shows where a show lookup table sits in practice: fixed above simple printer-light corrections, so that dailies and the final grade share one rendering. The source does not cover HDR deliverables. |
| Oppenheimer (2023) | 65 mm colour and black-and-white negative; photochemical prints | A recent large production finished on film for its print release. The source is the stock's manufacturer, so it is exact about materials and silent on how the digital versions were made. |
Each statement is labelled by kind — established fact, a standard’s requirement, observed market data, a convention, or Colourwise’s own interpretation or analysis — with the strength of the evidence behind it.
FactModerate evidence
For The Matrix, sets for the simulated world were built with very dark green walls and window backings were altered to show white skies, in addition to green filtration and green added in the timing.
Source: Flashback: The Matrix (Christopher Probst, American Cinematographer, April 1999)
FactModerate evidence
The red look of the Las Vegas scenes in Blade Runner 2049 was produced by lighting gels, in filter packs combining a pink and an orange gel made for the production, according to the cinematographer.
Source: Uncanny Valley: Blade Runner 2049 (Rachael Bosley, American Cinematographer, December 2017)
FactModerate evidence
On Roma, set colours were chosen for how they rendered in black-and-white: a greenish colour was used for floor tiles because the original yellowish ones rendered too light.
Source: Roma: Memories of Mexico (Mark Dillon, American Cinematographer, 7 January 2019)
FactModerate evidence
The colourist of House of the Dragon describes a grade made more neutral than the preceding series so that costume and set colour could carry, with costume colour marking house allegiance.
Source: Crafting Legacy for House of the Dragon (Matt Mulcahey, American Cinematographer, 2 December 2022)
Colourwise interpretationLimited evidence
Across the documented productions, the colour most often credited to grading in popular accounts is recorded by the makers as originating in design or lighting, with timing or grading reinforcing it.
Based on: Colourwise's reading of the design and process statements in the productions dataset. The titles were chosen because a detailed record exists, so this is a pattern in well-documented films, not a finding about films in general.
Caveat: Trade interviews favour the departments interviewed, and productions with unusual methods are more likely to be written up.
Source: Flashback: The Matrix (Christopher Probst, American Cinematographer, April 1999); Uncanny Valley: Blade Runner 2049 (Rachael Bosley, American Cinematographer, December 2017); Ring Bearers: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Simon Gray, American Cinematographer, December 2001)
Reviewed 6 October 2026. Colourwise summarises its sources in its own words and does not reproduce standards text or proprietary colour data. Spotted an error? Tell us.