Just watched an interesting video where someone tests a large number of films both objectively looking at a calibration target and subjectively and explains what each does to the colours.
It doesn’t seem to have had many views (8642 so far), so I thought it was worth linking here. Well worth a watch.
I watched that yesterday, too. What a fantastic video! I wish they could share those graphs (or film scans) with the community directly.
Edit: the author just answered my Youtube comment and said they would indeed share something soon, on their website.
Isn’t it wild how drastically these films change the colors, yet still come out with a cohesive image? It makes me wonder if I shouldn’t be much more drastic and creative with my color edits.
I think it came up in my feed for the same reason. I’ve been watching a lot about using colour in editing. My colour work is very limited and I’m looking to improve, but I also dislike most obvious colour grading because it feels contrived. It’s clearly going to take me a while to find my voice, but in the mean time I can learn the theory, watch what and why others make the choices they do and keep an eye out for what I like in others work and what makes me feel something special in the real world.
If you spot that they have shared the graphs, please let us know.
Good times when color science was done by scientists and we could reap all this work by simply using the film 
It would be nice to see the actual response curves by hue and light intensity, as the response also depends on the latter, not only hue. But of course doing what he did is already a lot of work.
I also want to do this but I usually end up not liking the result. I think my style is going in the direction of more subdued edits. Since sigmoid, I usually do not grade colors at all in most cases. I find some over-exaggerated styles trite after a couple of photos.
I think this went both ways: the scientists who created the classic film looks did what they could with very limited degrees of freedom (it’s a couple of chemicals, it’s not like you can do everything you want), but in due course some of the compromises they had to live with became accepted as a certain look and was sought for for various artistic styles.
When I grow tired of grading my photos, I usually wish for some high-quality presets (like Fuji and now Panasonic offers) to get quick OOC JPEGs. But when I try the latter or even someone else’s LUT on raw files, I want to go back to a natural look as a baseline and full editing freedom.
We have some projects on this site that simulates film extremely well in my view. I doubt his numbers etc will be that useful. The interesting thing about the video is the comparisons imho.
I’m someone who really dislikes how contemporary movies over use colour grading and colour coordination of sets and props but absolutely love the look of many older movies shot on film. Even movies such as Dirty Harry have an amazing look.
I find that its easy as a photographer to end up in that affected zone where many contemporary movies are. Missing the mark of analogue photos.
I have no idea why real negatives feel ok despite these dramatic changes to look. Perhaps it’s memory perhaps it’s the hours spent by colour scientist or it’s the chemical base of it all.
The projects on pixls do get there imho and generally provide controls that maintain the right balance. Freely colour grading is extremely difficult particularly because you recalibrate your brain while working and end up way off base.
IMO a big part of modern movies and series is not the post processing but how they shoot and which lenses they use. I’ve ranted a bit on this forum before but lots of shooting is now done always wide open with flawed lenses which gives it an extremely blurry look not even seen in old stuff. Old moving pictures did use flawed lenses, but they rarely shot wide open, and when they did, it was either in low light scenarios or purposefully, not it seems like they are afraid of closing their apertures. Couple this with modern cameras with their huge sensors like the Alexa LF, Ursa, IMAX stuff, etc, and their DOF must be 1 millimeter.
That trend quite s recent thing I’d say and probably an attempt at making movies a bit gritty again. I think it could work but in my view it’s often accompanied by over grading which makes it affected again.
I think another part is that a stronger colour grade screams “cinematic”, even if it gets old quickly. It’s a shortcut, great sometimes, the matrix for example used it well to highlight that there was something wrong with simulated reality, but far overused. The OP of course was the Wizard of Oz. Using black and white for the mundane read world and the newly introduced technicolour with deliberately exaggerated pallets for the fantastical world of Oz.
Fun fact about The Matrix, it was shot on film, and largely without color filters or grading. They instead achieved that look through lighting and set design.
The second and third movie were shot digitally, and simply graded. It’s a much less interesting look.
For a an entertaining (but somewhat unhinged) take on The Matrix’ colors, I enjoyed this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lPU-kXEhSgk
Great video, huge work and interesting results. I watched two times already, and i will probably visit it more in the future.
Regarding scenario and structure of the video, author goes very quickly over the specific film cases, i for sure would prefer a bit longer examination of different photographs for particular film stock. But, if this is sort of overview, introduction into the series, so he will dive deeper per particular films latter, than it is still good approach. I only hope he would not stop now, that would be pity with all his acquired knowledge.