 Some film critics believe that you can oftentimes glance at a movie's color treatment and instantly tell its genre. Warm red tones for romances, desaturated colors for apocalyptic films, blue cold tones for horrors, fluorescent greens for sci-fi, yellow tones for film based in the desert, saturated vibrant red tones for comedies. And for everything else? Blue and orange, blue and orange, blue and orange, blue and orange. Epic, blue and orange, drama, blue and orange, bio, blue and orange. What emotion are filmmakers trying to lead us towards with this pair of opposing colors? And every other color treatment for that matter. Consider the mood ring, the hues of emoji or even aura photography. Like music in an elevator or a doctor's waiting room, color has the power to influence how we feel without our even noticing. Film directors have exploited our color connection for decades. In fact, there's a rulebook of emotions that colorists, the people who manipulate the colors of film, follow. Our response to color varies depending on culture and context. But here are a few examples of familiar emotional applications of color. Color grading is the process of applying this understanding of color and its power by altering and enhancing the color of emotion or still picture either electronically, photochemically, or digitally. Back in the day, filmmakers could only achieve a stylized look if they committed to using filters or if they spent a ton of cash to alter specific colors frame by frame. You've seen It's a Wonderful Life, but have you seen It's a Wonderful Life in color? Now that everything is shot digitally, color grading is less expensive, more accessible and flexible. O Brother, Where Art Thou was the first movie to be entirely digitally color graded. The story took place during the Great Depression, so cinematographer Roger Deakins applied a warm sepia tone to the whole movie to make us feel like we were in the 30s. Since then, digital color grading has become a standard practice for filmmakers. And one color grading trend that seems to be taking over Hollywood is blue and orange. There are a lot of theories out there, but one leading theory is that this color treatment makes actors pop against the background. On the color wheel, skin tones are mainly in the orange range, and the complementary color of orange is blue. So when you take your orange tone to actor and then push everything else into the opposing color range, this contrast leaves you with the Hollywood look. Now that you understand the basics of color grading and some of its more common uses, you can try for yourself using a variety of easy-to-use apps, such as the iOS app VideoGrade. We decided to test out these color grading theories with some of our own footage. We picked a shot and gave it different treatments to explore how much we could change the mood of the scene. You be the judge. Of course, it's not as important to know how to manipulate color as it is to know how color can manipulate you.