Personally I like to go more for the analogous color grade like purple/blue or green/blue very similar to what you see with certain film stocks. When subtle it looks really pleasing.
If you look at certain film types the “grade” or look is actually really strong. But certainly do I agree that a lot of grades people pull of look cheesy.
It seems absolutely legit for a French Queen to wear a blue dress and being surrounded by blue sky reminding the background color of French Kings coat-of-arms (azur).
I think that the subtle and artistic use of colors in this painting cannot be compared to the rough use of teal and orange trick.
I’m with you on modern movie colour grading, I find them hard to look at visually, across the board. Commonly they are too dark, too overly saturated, or the ‘look’ - of which teal/orange is common - lacks subtlety. It’s a trend that has been increasing since the 90’s.
The general trend in this direction has been ongoing for many many decades now, across all art forms. I prefer things more natural as well.
My $0.02:
I think color grading in movies can be beautiful if not done lazily. This involves using the right props and backgrounds on the set already and adjusting the color for every scene individually. I love to pay attention to this while watching Wes Anderson movies. It’s not subtle at all but it works and gives the movies a specific “feel” or atmosphere.
What I don’t like is what many tv shows and also movies do where they slap a teal and orange look on the thing so they have a complementary color contrast that also works with the skin tones. But the thing is… We are photo editing nerds so we think that’s lame. My wife doesn’t even see the most obvious teal-orange look (Orphan Black, ugh…) if I don’t make her look closely. And I think most people don’t even recognize the color grading so obviously it seems to work for most of the audience. I wouldn’t be surprised if to most people it just somehow looks more professional although they couldn’t quite put their finger on in as to why.
Oh, and when it comes to photo editing I also like to reduce the amount of colors in the image and try to find a pleasing harmony. Usually not to extremes but just bring similar colors closer together.
That was the video that inspired my presentation for the video meetings.
I am also working on a “Color Harmonizer” tool, also inspired by colo harmonies (who would have thought). It is in Python and extremely slow and not finished yet (read buggy). But maybe I’ll present the idea here soon.
BTW, for anyone who wants to use that thing she does in Photoshop where you can see the hues there’s this neat little trick I use in RT (I’m sure it also works in DT):
Go to Lab and use this L curve:
It’s nice to work with RGB curves in this view to find a nice color for your shadows which I sometimes struggle with in the “normal” view.
The video is absolutely phenomenal. Not sure what is the easiest way to achieve this in darktable. Lightroom has these sliders for greens / oranges / blues etc. I tried color zones and color look up table. But have limited success when I target specific hues. I am curious if @Bruce_Williams can do some video specifically for color grading - sorry Bruce for putting you on the spot but I like your videos 
The method I use in dt is to use the color balance module. It lets you target shadows/mids/highlights each with a separate hue and saturation. Can even get more specific if you use multiple modules and masking. It operates similar to the color wheels in capture one and Lightroom for grading.
Thank you - I am going to try this approach. Perhaps with masking. Color harmonies is one item that I’d like to improve on. What do you use for color identification? I tried lowpass with contrast 0, brightness 0, saturation +1. It appears to be similar what the video points to.
The author points to https://paletton.com/ as a good source of harmonies and also @priort pointed to Adobe’s color wheel
For choosing my colors I tend to harmonize by using analogous colors. I tend to just pick them myself as once you understand the color theory basics you can easily choose your own scheme using the theories as a basis without needing a tool to do it for you. For instance Complementary colors are opposite on the color wheel. Popular example is Teal and Orange which are complementary colors. This is a harsh and punchy relationship and can be quite jarring depending on the use.
Analogous colors on the other hand are neighbors. So the color transitions are less jarring and more gentle. My favorite is Blue/Purple/magenta.
Another good one is to mix analogous and complementary something like Blue/Purple/Orange or Even Green/Cyan/Magenta can be interesting.
A good baseline I find is to study the colors of various film emulsions Particularly Kodak/Fuji emulsions they really worked hard to get pleasing color casts from their chemical processes.
Most of my grades are done via tri-toning and I base those colors off of what would work for the particular scene. because a scene with a lot of pink will not really hold up well for instance if you add magenta it would probably just over pinkify the entire scene. Tri-tone on the shadows/mids/highlights with color balance is basically like applying a Gradient Map across the image tainting the tones with the grade. Can get some cool stuff if you use blend modes as well to tweak the math behind the mapping.
Thank you again… the color look up table does have mapping to fuji (emulations). This maybe a good place to start and then adjust.
Yes that is how I got started except using the RT HaldCLUT’s eventually I just deviated away from them and started doing my own grades to taste.
One of the thing’s I’ve been using more often is the live samples in darktable. When I start editing an image, I take some samples of what the “main” colors in the image (usually area selections) and try to make sure those look pleasing at the end of my edit. For example, a before and after:
In the development version, you can find a vectorscope that in combination with the color picker helps you to identify colors.
The RGB color balance module (also in the dev version) is a suitable tool for this.
A huge thanks for this discussion! As a newbie I was very interesting to read.
That was a great video!!
I’m going to have to watch it a second time, I think, just to help it all sink in.