How to Get the A24 Film Look: Color Grading Guide

Defining the A24 aesthetic

A24 became shorthand for a visual style across films as different as Moonlight, Lady Bird, The Lighthouse, Midsommar, and Everything Everywhere All at Once. What's striking is how varied those films are and yet how clearly they belong to the same family — they share a visual DNA of muted color, natural light, embraced grain, and restraint. So the first thing to understand is that the "A24 look" isn't a single recipe; it's an approach. It prioritizes naturalism over polish, allows imperfection rather than scrubbing it out, and uses color to serve the story instead of to dazzle. This guide translates that approach into exact slider values, and if you just want to copy and paste, the 30-second version sits at the bottom.

What the color is actually doing

Underneath the variety, a consistent set of color choices recurs. The palette is desaturated — primaries are pulled back and skin reads natural rather than enhanced, so nothing shouts. It's also limited, with most scenes living inside two or three color families so the image coheres into a mood instead of popping in every direction. Shadows lean subtly cool, blue-green rather than the aggressive teal of a blockbuster grade. Highlights stay natural, with no crushed blacks or clipped whites — that gentle, film-style roll-off again. And earth tones do a lot of the work: browns, olives, and ochres show up constantly, which is what makes the palette feel organic rather than digital. Every value in the recipes below is in service of those five qualities.

The A24 base recipe (universal)

Open the film filters editor, select Classic Chrome, then override these values:

• Preset: Classic Chrome
• Contrast: 108 (slightly less punch than the preset default)
• Saturation: 78 (further desaturate)
• Brightness: 98
• Temperature: +3 (very subtle warmth)
• Tint: -4 (push slightly green)
• Highlights: -10
• Shadows: +12 (lifted, never crushed)
• Fade: 8
• Matte: 10 (this is the secret — it lifts blacks the way film does)
• Grain: 18
• Split Tone Intensity: 24
• Split Tone Shadow Color: #283828 (olive green)
• Split Tone Highlight Color: #d4c8a0 (warm ochre)
• Split Tone Balance: 42

This produces the universal A24 baseline: lifted shadows, ochre highlights, restrained color. From here, adjust per-film.

Per-film recipes

Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) — neon-saturated nights, heavy blue cast.

• Start from the base recipe
• Temperature: -12
• Tint: +6
• Saturation: 88
• Split Tone Shadow Color: #0c2440
• Split Tone Highlight Color: #d8a880 (skin-warm against blue)
• Halation: 6, Halation Color: #ff5060
• Vignette: 18

Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017) — warm Sacramento daylight, soft nostalgia.

• Start from the base recipe
• Temperature: +10
• Saturation: 84
• Highlights: +5
• Bloom: 6
• Split Tone Highlight Color: #f0d8a8 (golden)
• Grain: 14

Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019) — blown-out daylight, unnerving brightness.

• Start from the base recipe
• Brightness: 108
• Highlights: +18
• Saturation: 72
• Fade: 14
• Split Tone Highlight Color: #f8f0d8
• Vignette: 0 (full bright frame)
• Bloom: 10

The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019) — high-contrast B&W, 1.19:1.

• Switch preset to Acros
• Contrast: 135
• Grain: 34
• Vignette: 22
• Letterbox: pick 2.39:1 then crop tighter (the native 1.19:1 is closer to square; this is the closest available)

Everything Everywhere All at Once — varies by "universe," but the verse-jumping baseline:

• Start from the base recipe
• Saturation: 104 (slightly more than baseline)
• Bloom: 8
• Chromatic Aberration: 2
• Halation: 4

Pair with the right tools

A24 films almost never have animated kinetic captions. If you need text:

• Depth text for titles that sit inside the scene — this is the A24 move (Moonlight's "i.", "ii.", "iii." chapter cards work this way)
• Use a serif font like Instrument Serif or Crimson Text at low opacity
• Auto captions in Inter Regular, white, no background, no animation

For talking-head content cut from longer interviews, Polish the cuts so the rhythm stays slow — A24 dialog has space.

The mistakes that break the look

A few errors will pull you out of A24 territory no matter how carefully you set the rest. The biggest is over-saturation — restraint is the whole point, so if your colors pop, you've gone too far. Grain is the next trap: A24 grain is fine, in the 14–20 range, never 30-plus, because chunky grain reads as generic "vintage" rather than A24's understated texture. Don't crush your shadows, either; lift them by roughly +8 to +15, since A24 shadows are open and breathing rather than blocked to black. The single most overlooked control is the Matte slider at 8–12 — that slight lift of pure blacks, mimicking the density of film base, is what separates this from a plain muted grade, and skipping it is why most attempts look flat instead of filmic. Finally, don't slap a hard letterbox on everything; most A24 films are 1.85:1 or 2.39:1, but bars on vertical or social content look tacked-on, so reserve them for landscape footage.

Some of this lives in the lighting, not the grade

It's worth being honest that color grading only takes you part of the way. A24 films lean on natural or naturalistic light — window light, practical lamps, minimal fill, mixed color temperatures left deliberately uncorrected — and you can't fully manufacture that in post. What you can do is support it: follow the recipe, resist the urge to artificially recover highlights, and shoot in soft, available light when you have the choice. The grade flatters good light; it doesn't invent it.

The 30-second version

If you only do three things:

1. 1Apply Classic Chrome at default
2. 2Drop Saturation to 78, push Matte to 10
3. 3Add Grain at 16

That gets you 80% of the way. The per-film tweaks above are for the last 20%.

Open the filters tool and try the recipe.

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