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xiota
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While I generally agree with @Tetsujin's answer and approach to reproducing this effect, the sample images appear to have been created to specifically emulate a cinematic look. Because of this, I doubt that much time was spent fiddling with common photo editing tools. Rather, I suspect that a CLUT (color lookup table) was applied to a color corrected original. This technique seems to be more commonly used in video editing than it is in photo editing.

A CLUT can be created by loading an image, such as @AlanJurgensen's photograph, color correcting to neutral, then editing the image together with a color table. The final color table is the CLUT. Some techniques cannot be used, such as contrast masking.

These are the steps I used to replicate the "look" with GIMP.

  1. Levels with Luminance blending
  2. Desaturate.
  3. Swap Red and Green.
  4. Luma darken with copy of desaturated layer.
  5. Copy Visible, overlay, mask with grayscale copy.
  6. Copy previous layer, overlay, mask with vignetting.
  7. Copy Visible, final adjustments for export. (such as "crushing" levels)

layer stack

final image

Also, note that the original images exhibit ring-shaped or "bubble" bokeh, which is caused by the types of lens used to record the image (Cooke Triplet). (Different from swirly bokeh, which is caused by a different lens feature.)

xiota
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