Tech Noir LUTs

The Look

Cold steel hues, acid-green glow, and deep crushed blacks. The tech-noir look is what makes a frame feel like the inside of a server room or the wrong side of a Tokyo alley at 3 AM. It's a high-contrast, low-saturation grade with green-shifted shadows and steel-blue highlights. Anything organic in the frame, skin and vegetation, gets pulled cooler so the artificial light sources (neon, monitors, LEDs) read as the warm points of the image.

Inspired by The Matrix

The Matrix (1999) defined the modern version of this look. DP Bill Pope and the Wachowskis used Bleach Bypass processing combined with green-shifted color timing to telegraph that scenes inside the Matrix were unreal. Every shot inside the simulation has that signature green tint, while scenes in the real world shift to cool blues. The look has since become shorthand for hacker culture, cyberpunk, and dystopian sci-fi. Mr. Robot, Black Mirror, Ex Machina, and the Cyberpunk 2077 marketing all use variants of it.

Best For

• Sci-fi short films and trailers
• Cyberpunk music videos
• Tech product films and software trailers
• Hacker / coding content (vlogs, streams, courses)
• Anything shot at night with neon or screen light

Color Notes

Tech-noir is unforgiving on skin. The green push can quickly turn faces sickly. Use the softer variants on talking-head footage. The crushed variants work best on architectural, wide, or environmental shots where there's no human face to protect. Pair with cool LED key lighting on set if you can; fluorescent or tungsten will fight the grade.