It's got nothing to do with netflix. Digital is not to blame either, but it's certainly a catalyst.
It mostly has to do with insecurity surrounding digital and the bizarre idea that saturation is trying to 'emulate' film, (when color timing films was always just been about trying to emulate reality).
You can correct most of this problem with a decent media player. Just play a film in VLC and touch up the saturation and possibly the contrast in the effects settings.
It really doesn't take much adjustment to makes a film that once had a depressing palette suddenly half decent. I can't tolerate watching films through sunglasses so do this pretty often.
It really is a fashion. I've seen an advert for grading software that had a famous photographer casually showing the viewer how he ruins his pictures with this process of desaturation. I've no why people think this looks good, but it is deliberate.
I asked the cinematography reddit once why people do this and got a lot of incoherent responses about how saturation is just trying to emulate film and that it's just how 'new' things should look. Apparently many new filmmakers experience of reality has been through tea-shades on an overcast day. It beggars belief.
Colors, yes - but the article discusses more than just grading, it's the entire visual language that is optimized and inevitably lacks individuality. I don't think it's just fashion, more likely it's the result of convergence in a mature industry under market pressure. The same trend is also clearly visible in everything visual in the recent two decades, not just cinematography.
https://www.vox.com/culture/22840526/colors-movies-tv-gray-d...
There's another article I can't find on it.
It's got nothing to do with netflix. Digital is not to blame either, but it's certainly a catalyst.
It mostly has to do with insecurity surrounding digital and the bizarre idea that saturation is trying to 'emulate' film, (when color timing films was always just been about trying to emulate reality).
You can correct most of this problem with a decent media player. Just play a film in VLC and touch up the saturation and possibly the contrast in the effects settings.
It really doesn't take much adjustment to makes a film that once had a depressing palette suddenly half decent. I can't tolerate watching films through sunglasses so do this pretty often.
It really is a fashion. I've seen an advert for grading software that had a famous photographer casually showing the viewer how he ruins his pictures with this process of desaturation. I've no why people think this looks good, but it is deliberate.
I asked the cinematography reddit once why people do this and got a lot of incoherent responses about how saturation is just trying to emulate film and that it's just how 'new' things should look. Apparently many new filmmakers experience of reality has been through tea-shades on an overcast day. It beggars belief.