Senior colourist Josh Bohoskey helped shape a picture pipeline on the HBO Max show that could manage heavy vignetting, unpredictable contrast and a seasonal colour shift running across the series.
From the outset, Rooster was not meant to look clean. Cinematographer Blake McClure ASC wanted the HBO Max series to have a softer, more lived-in quality; something warm, familiar and slightly off-centre, rather than the crisp finish often associated with high-end streaming.
“He described it as wanting to feel like a wool sweater: warm, cosy and timeless,” recalls senior colourist Josh Bohoskey. “We tried to let the natural colours behave naturally rather than heavily tinting the image toward teal or blue.”
That thinking informed the production before a frame was shot. McClure captured the series on Blackmagic’s URSA Cine 17K 65, using ColorCon filters attached to the lens. For Bohoskey, who joined the project through DigitalFilm Tree, the post facility handling the series, those filters quickly became both the show’s defining visual signature and the main technical obstacle in the grade.
“These filters are essentially lights shooting directly into the lens, which destroys shadow detail and milks out the image,” he explains. “It pushes the camera right to the edge.”
The result was a vintage, filmic image, but one that could be difficult to control. Small exposure changes caused contrast to shift sharply, while the filters introduced heavy vignetting and lens falloff that varied across the material.
“You’d have these super contrasty yet flat images, while also fighting very heavy vignettes created by the filters themselves and the lens falloff,” says Bohoskey. “Every shot had to be balanced before you could even start thinking about the actual look of the scene.”
That made prep work essential. Before production began, Bohoskey tested material with the team and helped create a show LUT designed to push through the ColorCon filters. He also worked with the dailies colourist on a node tree that could support the process from the start, rather than leaving every problem for the final grade.
The aim was to create a base correction that could get shots into the right area quickly. That structure then carried through into the final grade in DaVinci Resolve.
“There was also a plugin workflow in Resolve that became really important,” Bohoskey adds. “The Color Diffuser tool was essentially developed around trying to replicate the look of these ColorCon filters. If footage hadn’t been shot through the physical filters, we could use that plugin to bring scenes closer into the same visual world.”
The filters also produced the sort of imperfections that became part of the series’ character. Rather than trying to remove every flaw, Bohoskey leaned into some of the artefacts, from green pushes in the shadows to patches of softness that fell away unevenly.
“You’d get strange green pushes in the shadows or softness falling off in unusual ways,” he says. “If you hadn’t physically seen that happen through the lens, you probably wouldn’t think to create it artificially.”
Continuity became the biggest challenge once the grade was underway. With so many variables introduced at capture, each shot needed careful balancing before the creative work could really begin. After the first few episodes, Bohoskey says he began to understand what the filters were doing and how to work around them.
Instead of lifting and shaping the image in the usual way, he often had to add contrast first, then brighten the shot while protecting the black levels, before rebalancing saturation, which could jump during the earlier stages. “It became an entirely different way of thinking about grading,” says Bohoskey.
The look also had to move with the story. Rooster begins in autumn and moves towards winter, so McClure wanted the palette to become colder but leaning more green than your traditional blue cold.
For Bohoskey, the main lesson was that the right image is not always the technically correct one. Highlights were allowed to blow out. Shadows were allowed to behave unpredictably. The grade embraced qualities that would usually be corrected or avoided.
“One of the biggest things was intentionally breaking traditional grading rules,” he says. “Normally, you’re trained to protect the highlights, but Blake and I found ourselves leaning into the idea of letting them go. On paper it shouldn’t work, but it created this really beautiful look.”
DaVinci Resolve’s grouping system was also central to keeping the episodic workflow manageable. By placing the LUT, grain and broader show texture in the post group structure, Bohoskey could keep clip-level work focused on individual shot adjustments rather than rebuilding the look repeatedly. “If someone wants to reduce grain globally, it’s one adjustment rather than touching every shot individually,” he explains.
With a second season confirmed, the team has already identified the moments from season one they want to carry forward and refine.
