Cinematic Color in RawTherapee

As @houz mentioned, it’s another derivative of orange/teal grading.

It’s touched on in this post:

And is very similar to the recent request for emulating another photographers color toning:

https://discuss.pixls.us/t/achieve-the-masashi-wakui-look/

In particular, I went into a bit more depth on accomplishing this in this particular post on that topic (for darktable, but the theory is the same):

Achieve the Masashi Wakui look - #11 by patdavid

You’ll want to push the shadows and midtones to a blue/teal/green (adjust to taste), while pulling highlights to either neutral or push orange into them (even in your example the skin tones appear to trend orange). Perhaps some overall desaturation as well to mute the colors would help.

In RawTherapee you can drop the saturation a bit using the slider in the Exposure menu (and/or adjustments to a Tone curve can help).

On the Color menu, I’d look at either the RGB Curves or the Color Toning menus to being your adjustments. On the Color Toning method, you can choose “Color Balance Shadows/Midtones/Highlights”. Adjust from there.

To illustrate, I found a picture of a gorgeous model in some neat looking european city:

With that image all I did was apply Color Toning in RawTherapee:

To arrive at something like this (not exactly like yours, but the theory is the same more or less):

The thing to remember with cinema color grading is that they’ll often work with grading based on luminous zones in the image (shadows/midtones/highlights) in general, then apply masking as needed. It’s an art. :slight_smile: