Cinema effects

O Brother, Where Art Thou was shot in digital, and employed color manipulation throughout--applying, to make a crude comparison, the equivalent of Instagram's "Nashville" filter on all of the trees, making them less green and more Mississippi mud while keeping the blues blue.

Professional photography and cinema, to be clear, always manipulated reality for emotional effect, and cinema and photography do far more than provoke nostalgia. The immediacy of digital was perfect, for instance, for Michael Mann's film Collateral. And of course digital filmmaking is opening up wild new possibilities, as Avatar made obvious. What's changed in the last several years is that not only are digital cameras capturing more pixels, but they're also getting better at capturing a wider dynamic range between blacks and whites--at allowing cinematographers to mimic the effects of underexposing or overexposing footage that celluloid allows.

As the actor Greta Gerwig puts it in Side by Side, "They've processed digital now to make it look like film, as if film is inherently better."