LuttieThe teal and orange look
Push shadows toward teal, keep skin warm and orange, and you get the most recognisable colour scheme in modern cinema. It works because teal sits opposite orange on the colour wheel, so skin separates from everything behind it without touching saturation.
Where it comes from
Teal and orange became the default blockbuster palette in the early 2000s, when digital intermediate grading made it cheap to split shadows and highlights independently. Skin tones already sit in the orange part of the spectrum, so cooling everything else is the fastest way to make a person pop off a background — a trick colourists had used with film printer lights for decades, now available on a slider.
How to grade it
In order. Every control below exists in the Luttie editor, free to use in your browser.
White balance
Neutralise first. Teal and orange applied over an existing cast compounds it.
Color wheels — Shadows
Drag toward cyan/blue, roughly 5–10% of the wheel. Stop before the blacks tint visibly.
Color wheels — Highlights
Nudge toward orange by about half the shadow move. Highlights carry skin, so overdo it and faces go sunburnt.
HSL — Orange
Lift saturation slightly and shift hue a degree or two toward red. This is what keeps skin looking like skin.
RGB curves — Blue
Lift the blue channel's shadow end, pull its highlight end down. This is the split that makes the look, more than the wheels do.
Contrast
Add a gentle S-curve last. The split reads as intentional when contrast supports it.
When it works
Wide shots where a subject needs to separate from a busy background
Night exteriors with practical lights already leaning warm
Coverage shot on different cameras that needs to feel like one scene
Anything that should read as 'cinematic' at a glance
When to avoid it
Skip it on scenes where the background is already warm — a sunset or a wood-panelled interior fights the teal and the whole frame turns muddy. It also hurts documentary and product work, where accurate colour matters more than separation.
Frequently asked
Skin tones fall in a narrow band of hues between red and yellow — effectively orange. Teal sits almost directly opposite on the colour wheel, so pushing everything that isn't skin toward teal creates maximum separation with minimum saturation. Your eye reads that separation as depth, which is why the look survives compression and small screens so well.
It is, and that's a fair criticism of applying it at full strength to everything. Used at 30–50% strength as a base rather than a finish, it still does its job — separating a subject — without announcing itself. The complaint is usually about intensity, not the underlying idea.
Move the shadows, not the highlights. Most over-orange skin comes from pushing the highlight wheel too far warm. Get the separation from cooling shadows and from the blue curve, then add only as much warmth to highlights as the scene needs. Use the HSL orange band to pull saturation back if faces still read as tanned.
Yes. Build the grade in the editor and export a .cube file that works in DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro and CapCut. LUT export is a Pro feature; grading in the browser and downloading the ready-made LUT below are both free.
Build it on your own footage
Drop in a photo or pull a frame from a video, grade it in the browser, and export a .cube LUT for DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro or CapCut.
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