15 Best Color Graded Movies, With Their Color Palettes

The best color graded movies don’t just look pretty. Their color tells you where you are, who to trust and how to feel, often before a word is spoken. Some of these looks were built in a grading suite over months. Others were painted onto walls, sewn into costumes or caught at the right minute of the day.

This list counts down 15 films to the best of them. Each one comes with a six-color palette pulled from a real frame (tap a swatch to copy its hex code), who graded it and how the look was made.

The Best Color Graded Movies at a Glance

#	Film	The look	Graded by	Cinematography Oscar
15	The Fall (2006)	Real locations in saturated color	Locations and costumes	Not nominated
14	Her (2013)	Warm reds, almost no blue	Jack Lewars	Not nominated
13	Moonlight (2016)	Rich skin tones, teal and blue	Alex Bickel	Nominated
12	Traffic (2000)	Blue, warm white and gold storylines	Cinesite	Not nominated
11	Se7en (1995)	Silver retention, inky blacks	Deluxe lab	Not nominated
10	The Shape of Water (2017)	Green and teal, red for love	In camera	Nominated
9	Hero (2002)	A color for every chapter	Film stocks	Not nominated
8	The Matrix (1999)	Green code world, blue real world	Lab timing	Not nominated
7	Amélie (2001)	Hazy reds, greens and yellows	Yvan Lucas	Nominated
6	La La Land (2016)	Real Technicolor-style color	Natasha Leonnet	Won
5	In the Mood for Love (2000)	Red curtains, jade walls	Sets and costumes	Not nominated
4	The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)	Pink, red and purple by era	Jill Bogdanowicz	Nominated
3	O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)	Dusty postcard yellow	Cinesite	Nominated
2	Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)	Orange desert, deep blue sky	Eric Whipp	Nominated
1	Blade Runner 2049 (2017)	Orange haze, cold gray city	Mitch Paulson	Won

15) The Fall (2006)

Tarsem shot The Fall in real places so colorful that most viewers assume the grade did the work.

The film was shot over four years in more than 20 countries, from a stepwell in Rajasthan to the dunes of Namibia. The blue city of Jodhpur really is blue, and Tarsem helped it along by giving locals paint. The fantasy is full of red, blue and gold, while the hospital where the story is told stays “very dull and grey” on purpose, Tarsem said.

That contrast is the lesson. A grade can only push the colors that are already in front of the lens. Tarsem told Rotten Tomatoes, “There are no special effects in this film,” meaning no green screen or CGI set extensions. He paid for most of it himself, and a 4K restoration in 2024 brought it back to festivals and streaming.

14) Her (2013)

Her looks warm and safe because the team took almost all the blue out of a story about loneliness.

Van Hoytema felt blue belonged to science fiction, so he cut it wherever he could. Production designer K.K. Barrett put red into Theodore’s shirts, the offices and even the sunlight. The future Los Angeles is mostly Shanghai, shot over about two weeks, and it never turns cold.

The final grade finished the job. “We drained a lot of the blue out,” colorist Jack Lewars told Post Magazine. He also kept the contrast low and lifted the blacks, so even the night scenes feel soft. Try it on your own footage: pull blue from the shadows and the whole film reads as gentle and nostalgic.

13) Moonlight (2016)

Moonlight’s grade makes dark skin glow in teal, blue and magenta light that most films never try.

Laxton shot on the ARRI Alexa with anamorphic lenses and used RGB LED panels to shift the color at night. Each of the three chapters got its own LUT, so Chiron’s childhood, teenage years and adulthood each feel like a different film stock. Miami’s sodium street lamps added a warm red and green cast to the night scenes.

Bickel pushed further than most colorists would dare. “In many cases, too far wasn’t far enough,” he told Post Magazine. The trick was raising saturation and contrast while keeping the detail in the actors’ faces. The film cost about $1.5 million and won Best Picture.

12) Traffic (2000)

Traffic gives each of its three stories its own color, so you always know where you are.

Soderbergh shot the East Coast story on tungsten stock with no filter for a cold blue. San Diego got diffusion, flashing and overexposure for a warm, blooming look. The Mexico scenes went gold and sharp, with a 45-degree shutter. The whole film then went through an extra Ektachrome step to boost grain and contrast.

Accounts of the gold differ. Soderbergh has said he used tobacco filters. Cinesite says the gold was added in the digital grade of the Tijuana reels. Either way, Soderbergh wanted “degraded grainy contrasty imagery,” and the color coding lets audiences follow three stories at a glance.

11) Se7en (1995)

Se7en’s blacks look like ink because the lab left most of the silver in the release prints.

Normal film processing bleaches the silver out. Deluxe’s CCE process kept about 75 percent of it in some release prints, which deepened the blacks and drained the color. A full bleach bypass made faces look old and hard, so Deluxe raised only the top of the curve and kept detail in the shadows.

On set, Khondji underexposed interiors and mixed warm lamps with cold fluorescent tubes. He wanted blacks like “India ink.” After the film came out, Deluxe’s clients started asking for “the look of Seven.” Today you’d build the same effect in the grade with a bleach bypass LUT.

10) The Shape of Water (2017)

The Shape of Water is a world of greens and teals where red only appears for love or death.

Laustsen built the look on set with gels, a Black Pro-Mist filter and sets painted in del Toro’s greens. The steel blue came from Mimic, their 1997 film. The creature suit was repainted greener after tests. Del Toro wanted red only “when it’s about love or death,” so red is held back for those moments.

Laustsen told Definition he barely changed the color in the DI. That’s a good reminder that the strongest grades often start with paint and fabric. Fox Searchlight offered del Toro $17 million to shoot in black and white or $20 million in color. He took the color.

9) Hero (2002)

Hero tells the same story several times, and each version has its own color.

Doyle shot most of Hero on Fuji film but switched to Kodak for the red chapter to get a deeper, more solid red. When the crew ran out of colors for the green flashback, Fuji gave them an unusual green. The leaf fight in yellow was the hardest: film turns yellow slightly green and gives it blue shadows, so the crew filled gaps in the trees to block out the blue.

“Color is a character in this film,” Doyle wrote in American Cinematographer. Viewers love to decode the colors as symbols, but Doyle chose them for how they look, not what they mean. He even titled his production journal “R34G38B25,” an RGB value. The film reached US theaters in 2004.

8) The Matrix (1999)

The Matrix tints everything inside the computer world green, so you can feel the code before you see it.

The green came from old monochrome computer screens. The team added green filters to some scenes and extra green when the film was timed at the lab, and painted the walls green too. Australia’s blue skies were whitened out. “We didn’t want any cheery blue skies,” Pope told American Cinematographer. The real world went the other way, darker and bluer.

The green is now so linked to the film that later home releases kept pushing it harder. When the film was remastered in 4K in 2018, Pope supervised the new grade and brought it closer to the original 35mm release. It shows how a grade can drift over 20 years of reissues.

7) Amélie (2001)

Amélie’s Paris glows in reds, greens and yellows because the team treated the city like a storybook.

“He wanted very hazy, saturated colors,” Delbonnel said of Jeunet. Delbonnel moved away from a single yellow wash and built a full, rich spectrum instead. The crew cleared parked cars from the streets and redressed Montmartre with posters in the film’s colors.

There were no 3D LUTs in 2001, so the colorist had to picture the final film print from memory and skill. Reds, greens and yellows carry almost every frame, which is why the film feels so bold. Jeunet’s rule was simple. He once said, “I hate white skies.”

6) La La Land (2016)

La La Land looks like an old Technicolor musical, but almost all of its color was real.

Sandgren shot on 35mm film with anamorphic lenses to echo CinemaScope musicals. The color lives in the costumes, sets and skies. Mercury vapor street lights turn aqua green on film, which plays against the pink and purple dusk. The famous “A Lovely Night” sky over Los Angeles is real: the crew waited for magic hour to catch it.

“When you see La La Land, all the colors in the film are real,” Sandgren told Kodak. Saturation stayed normal in the DI. The lesson: if you plan color in the costumes and choose the right minute of daylight, the grade only has to protect it.

5) In the Mood for Love (2000)

In the Mood for Love traps its lovers in red curtains, mustard carpets and jade-green walls.

William Chang designed the sets, the costumes and edited the film. Maggie Cheung wears more than 20 cheongsams that shift from greens to bold florals with her character’s mood. The film was shot on 35mm over 15 months, partly in Bangkok, and Doyle left before the end, so Mark Lee Ping-bin finished it.

Red is the surprise. “Up to In the Mood for Love, there’s no red in Wong Kar-wai’s films,” Doyle told Reverse Shot. The 2020 4K restoration became controversial when Wong retimed the color greener, so the film you stream may not match the one Cannes saw in 2000.

4) The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

The Grand Budapest Hotel changes its colors and even its frame shape with each time period.

Each era has its own aspect ratio: the boxy 1.37:1 for 1932, widescreen for 1968 and 1.85:1 for the 1980s and the present. The 1932 palette came from Library of Congress photochrom postcards of alpine resorts. Bogdanowicz and her father, a former Kodak color scientist, built a photochrom-style LUT for some sections.

The plan was to fade the 1930s, but the team kept them bright to show off Milena Canonero’s costumes and Adam Stockhausen’s sets. “We wanted to be sure those things retained their richness,” Bogdanowicz told Studio Daily. The film won Oscars for both. If you search for a Wes Anderson color palette, this is the film people mean.

3) O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

O Brother, Where Art Thou? is widely credited as the first Hollywood feature graded entirely in a digital intermediate, and it turned a green summer into dusty gold.

The film was shot around Canton, Mississippi, in a lush green summer, and the Coens wanted the dry look of an old postcard. Lab tests such as bleach bypass drained every color, not just the greens. “I had to find a way to desaturate the greens,” Deakins told American Cinematographer. Only a digital intermediate could pick out one hue.

So the negative was scanned at 2K, graded for about ten weeks, mostly on the greens and overall saturation, and recorded back to film. Today nearly every feature goes through a digital grade, and this is where it started. Deakins later won his first Oscar for #1 on this list.

2) Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Mad Max: Fury Road broke the rule that the end of the world has to look gray.

Miller rejected the bleached, desaturated look of most post-apocalypse films and asked for color. Because the sets and costumes were sandy and neutral, the sky became the main source of color, and the grading team replaced hundreds of skies. The DI ran for most of a year across about 2,700 shots.

About half an hour of the film happens at night, but it was shot in full sun, overexposed by around two stops, then darkened and pushed blue in the grade. “Fury Road was a colourist’s dream,” Whipp told FilmLight. Miller’s own favorite version is the black and white “Black & Chrome” edition.

1) Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Blade Runner 2049 is our pick for the best color grade of the last decade, and most of it was done in camera.

The orange Las Vegas scenes came from custom filters made by Tiffen, gelled windows and a painted backing, with the 2009 Sydney dust storm as the reference. Los Angeles went the other way, wet, gray and cold. Deakins used the same on-set LUT he had used on Sicario and changed little from the dailies.

“Both Denis and I always wanted to do as much as possible in camera,” Deakins told American Cinematographer. The film won the Oscar for cinematography, Deakins’ first after 13 losses. It’s the best example of a grade that starts on set and only needs polishing in the suite.

Which Films Run Warm and Which Run Cool?

We measured the same frames used for the palettes. Blade Runner 2049 and Hero run warmest. The Fall and La La Land run coolest, thanks to Jodhpur’s blue walls and the purple dusk sky. One frame can’t sum up a whole film, but it shows how far a grade can lean. Your skin tones still need to sit in the warm range, which is why so many films push the background cool instead.

4 Classic Color Grading Looks

Teal and Orange

Most skin tones sit in the orange range, so pushing shadows and backgrounds toward teal makes actors pop. Colorists do it by adding teal to the shadows and orange to the highlights, often with a LUT. It spread around 2010, once nearly every film went through a digital grade.

Bleach Bypass

A lab skips some or all of the bleach step, so silver stays in the film over the color. The result is muted color, high contrast and heavy grain. Se7en’s partial version kept about 75 percent of the silver. Today most bleach bypass looks are built digitally.

Desaturated

Pull color out of part or all of the image. O Brother, Where Art Thou? removed the green from a Mississippi summer while keeping skin tones warm. A desaturated grade can feel dusty, historic or bleak, depending on what you leave in.

Single-Color Wash

Let one hue take over a whole world or story. The Matrix uses green, Traffic uses blue and gold, and Hero gives each chapter its own color. It works best when the audience learns the code early.

FAQs

Final Cut

The best color graded movies were rarely saved in the grade alone. Blade Runner 2049, La La Land and The Fall got their color in front of the lens, and O Brother and Fury Road show what a grade can do when it’s planned from day one. Copy a palette above, try it on your own footage, and start with our beginner’s guide to color grading or what color grading is.