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The Euphoria aesthetic
Euphoria (HBO, 2019—) cinematographer Marcell Rév established a look that has dominated short-form video aesthetics: saturated neon, purple-blue shadows, halation around every light source, and a dreamy bloom that softens everything.
The look is deliberately heavy. Unlike A24 restraint, Euphoria leans into excess. Get the recipe right and your phone footage starts looking like the show.
What the color is doing
The Euphoria palette has one trait that matters above all the others: the shadows are magenta-purple, not blue and not teal. That purple is the most distinctive and most-faked-wrong element of the whole look. Around it sits saturated complementary contrast — magenta against cyan, purple against green, hot pink against electric blue. Highlights bloom heavily, bleeding into surrounding areas so that skin appears to glow, and every light source carries a soft red-orange halation halo. A subtle chromatic aberration, somewhere around 2–4, adds a dreamlike fringe without looking broken, and the blacks lift the way Wong Kar-wai's do but pushed cooler. Get the purple shadows and the heavy bloom right and most of the look is already there.
The Euphoria base recipe
Open the film filters editor, select Neon Nights, then override:
- Preset: Neon Nights
- Contrast: 118
- Saturation: 140
- Brightness: 94
- Temperature: -15 (cool base)
- Tint: +12 (push magenta)
- Highlights: -5
- Shadows: +10
- Fade: 5
- Matte: 8
- Grain: 14
- Halation: 20
- Halation Color: #ff4080 (hot pink)
- Bloom: 22 (heavy)
- Bloom Threshold: 40 (catch more pixels)
- Chromatic Aberration: 3
- Split Tone Intensity: 35
- Split Tone Shadow Color: #2a0a40 (deep purple)
- Split Tone Highlight Color: #f08090 (warm pink)
- Split Tone Balance: 42
- Vignette: 22
Scene-specific variants
Party / club scenes — saturation maxed, more chromatic aberration:
- Saturation: 155
- Chromatic Aberration: 5
- Bloom: 28
- Halation: 28
Intimate / bedroom scenes — softer, warmer pink:
- Temperature: -5 (less cool)
- Bloom: 18
- Split Tone Highlight Color: #f8a8b8 (skin pink)
- Halation: 15
Outdoor daylight — Euphoria daylight is rare; when it appears it is hazy:
- Brightness: 104
- Highlights: +12
- Bloom: 20
- Saturation: 120 (less than night)
- Vignette: 10
Make-up close-ups (the glitter look) — extreme bloom:
- Bloom: 35
- Bloom Threshold: 30 (catch glitter)
- Saturation: 150
- Chromatic Aberration: 4
Captions, motion, and footage
Euphoria's titles are minimal — usually a thin sans-serif in white or hot pink, occasionally with a glow. In the captions tool, that means a light-weight font like Outfit Light or Manrope, in white or hot pink (#ff4080), no background, a subtle glow if your style supports it, positioned bottom or center. For text woven into the scene, depth text placing a name behind a subject works beautifully — a character's name appearing as they walk past a sign is pure Euphoria. Motion-wise, the show favors dramatic but smooth camera moves, so in the animations tool a slow push-in (zoom 100% to 110% over about four seconds) with gentle easing fits, while kinetic animated captions don't — the look is too cool for bouncing text.
Phone footage is a surprisingly good starting point, because sensor noise reads as the grain, HDR preserves shadow detail you can lift, and night-mode footage already sits in the right luminance range. The one thing to avoid is heavily pre-processed footage — iPhone's "Cinematic" mode applies its own grade that fights this recipe, so shoot in standard mode if you can.
The mistakes that break it
The recurring errors are specific. Blue shadows instead of purple is the big one — most "neon look" tutorials push blue, but Euphoria pushes magenta-purple, so your tint should be positive (+8 to +14), not negative. Not enough bloom is next; bloom at 22-plus is what creates the dreamlike softness, where at 10 it just looks normal. Forgetting halation flattens it — even daylight scenes carry it, so keep it at 15 or more. Heavy grain is wrong, since Euphoria is digital and clean at 12–16, not 30-plus. And zero chromatic aberration feels too clinical; a small amount, 2–4, is part of the signature.
The 30-second version
- 1Apply Neon Nights
- 2Push Bloom to 22, Tint to +12 (purple shadows)
- 3Add Halation at 20 with color #ff4080
Open the filters tool and try it.
Related: Wong Kar-wai look | Best filters for Instagram Reels | Cinestill 800T look
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