--- title: 'R. D. Rajasekhar Spent Two Months Taking the Colour Out of Ghajini' type: 'blog post' section: 'Craft' standfirst: 'Nine years shooting advertisements, then a debut that made him the house eye of a certain kind of Tamil thriller. The washed-out look people remember from Kaakha Kaakha has a name and a chemical process behind it, and the award-winning one after it took two months of deciding what to remove.' author: 'CinePixo' published: '2026-08-20' updated: '2026-08-20' about_people: - 'R. D. Rajasekhar' - 'Rajiv Menon' - 'Gautham Vasudev Menon' - 'A. R. Murugadoss' - 'Suriya' - 'Aamir Khan' about_films: - 'Minnale (2001)' - 'Kaakha Kaakha (2003)' - 'Gharshana (2004)' - 'Manmadhan (2004)' - 'Ghajini (2005)' - 'Akira (2016)' - '4 the People (2004)' - 'Dhaam Dhoom (2008)' - 'Varudu (2010)' - 'Action Jackson (2014)' tags: - 'R. D. Rajasekhar cinematographer' - 'Kaakha Kaakha bleach bypass' - 'Ghajini 2005 cinematography' - 'Tamil cinema cinematographers' - 'Gautham Vasudev Menon films' - 'A. R. Murugadoss Ghajini Akira' sources: - 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._D._Rajasekhar' - 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaakha_Kaakha' - 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghajini_(2005_film)' canonical: 'https://cinepixo.com/blog/r-d-rajasekhar-spent-two-months-taking-the-colour-out-of-ghajini' publisher: 'CinePixo' --- # R. D. Rajasekhar Spent Two Months Taking the Colour Out of Ghajini *Nine years shooting advertisements, then a debut that made him the house eye of a certain kind of Tamil thriller. The washed-out look people remember from Kaakha Kaakha has a name and a chemical process behind it, and the award-winning one after it took two months of deciding what to remove.* By CinePixo, 2026-08-20 · Craft ![The director Gautham Vasudev Menon, who gave Rajasekhar his first feature.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/ff30de23-7a8e-4e73-aece-b0c9882a6052.webp) *Photo: JUJU · [CC BY 2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gautham_Menon.jpg)* ## Nine years of advertisements Before R. D. Rajasekhar shot a feature he spent about nine years as an assistant cinematographer to Rajiv Menon, on advertising films. That is a long apprenticeship and an unusual one, and it shows in everything he did afterwards. Advertising teaches a particular discipline: an image has to arrive complete in a few seconds, so the lighting decision and the grade have to be made before the shoot rather than salvaged after it. A cinematographer who learns the job that way tends to arrive on a feature with a look already chosen, and to defend it. What got him hired was exactly that work. Gautham Vasudev Menon, a former colleague from the same world, was struck by his commercials, and gave him his first feature — *Minnale*, in 2001. It landed with young audiences, and the partnership stuck. ![Suriya, who played the lead in Kaakha Kaakha and again in Ghajini.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/d22f2ac9-738b-4d3c-a91d-9fc7d003fdfb.webp) *Photo: Epsajeevan · [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0) · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Soorya_sivakumar.jpg)* ## What bleach bypass actually does Their second film together, the 2003 crime thriller *Kaakha Kaakha*, is the one the look is remembered from. Menon wrote and directed it, Suriya and Jyothika played the leads, Harris Jayaraj scored it and Anthony cut it as his first film as editor. The accounts of Rajasekhar's work on it praise the visual style, and they name the technique: bleach bypass. It is worth being concrete about what that is, because it is one of the few photochemical decisions a viewer can see without being told. In normal processing, the bleach step strips the developed silver out of the film and leaves only the dyes. Skip it — bypass the bleach — and the silver stays in alongside the colour. The result is a print with a black-and-white image sitting inside the colour one: contrast up, colour pulled down, blacks that go dense and highlights that go chalky. The washed-out quality people describe is not a filter or a mood. It is metal that was supposed to be removed and was not. That is a commitment, too. A bleach bypass print is a decision made in the lab, on the negative, in a way that is expensive to undo. Choosing it for a police thriller in 2003 says something about how sure he and Menon were. It worked: the film took four Filmfare Awards South, one of them Rajasekhar's for best cinematography. He is also, if you are watching closely, in it — a special appearance in the song "Oru Ooril". It was remade the following year as *Gharshana*, and he shot that too, along with *Manmadhan* the same year. ![The director A. R. Murugadoss, who made Ghajini and later Akira with Rajasekhar.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/efc7d14e-f21b-488e-be75-a7f8f6bd9620.webp) ![Aamir Khan, who saw Ghajini and remade it in Hindi in 2008.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/7d9e1537-ccd9-4a29-8b02-f108c99382b7.webp) *Photos: Bollywood Hungama · [CC BY 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0) · [source 1](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Murugadoss.jpg), [source 2](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aamir_Khan_after_a_spa_session_in_Bandra.jpg)* ## Two months de-saturating In 2005 he began working with A. R. Murugadoss on *Ghajini*, and this is the credit that carries the awards. The detail I keep returning to is the schedule. He spent two months fine-tuning the look and de-saturating the images. Two months, on the removal of colour. That is a strange and rather brave allocation of time on a commercial Tamil thriller, and it is the opposite of how the grade usually gets described — as a pass, a polish, something applied at the end. Two months is not a polish. It is a second act of photography, done after the shooting, deciding for every sequence how much of the world's colour the film is going to admit to having seen. It won him Best Cinematographer at the Tamil Nadu State Film Awards for 2005, where the film also took best film, and a Filmfare Awards South nomination in the same category. He is a member of the Indian Society of Cinematographers. The film had a long afterlife. Aamir Khan saw it and decided to remake it, which is how *Ghajini* became a Hindi picture in 2008 — and how a look built in a Chennai lab reached an audience that never saw the original. He and Murugadoss came back together for *Akira* in 2016. ## The filmography people are searching for He works across Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Hindi — his Malayalam debut was *4 the People* in 2004 — and the films in this library credited to him include *Minnale*, *Kaakha Kaakha*, *Gharshana*, *Manmadhan*, *Ghajini*, *Dhaam Dhoom*, *Varudu*, *Action Jackson* and *Akira*. What holds that list together is not a genre. It is a preference about colour. Twice, in the two films that made his name, the notable decision was subtractive — take the silver out of the process, or take the saturation out of the image. A cinematographer whose signature is what he removed is a rarer thing than one with a palette, and considerably harder to imitate, because you cannot copy an absence by adding anything. ## In this piece - [R. D. Rajasekhar](https://cinepixo.com/people/r-d-rajasekhar) - [Rajiv Menon](https://cinepixo.com/people/rajiv-menon) - [Gautham Vasudev Menon](https://cinepixo.com/people/gautham-vasudev-menon) - [A. R. Murugadoss](https://cinepixo.com/people/a-r-murugadoss) - [Suriya](https://cinepixo.com/people/suriya) - [Aamir Khan](https://cinepixo.com/people/aamir-khan) - 2001 · [Minnale](https://cinepixo.com/movies/minnale-2001) - 2003 · [Kaakha Kaakha](https://cinepixo.com/movies/kaakha-kaakha-2003) - 2004 · [Gharshana](https://cinepixo.com/movies/gharshana-2004) - 2004 · [Manmadhan](https://cinepixo.com/movies/manmadhan-2004) - 2005 · [Ghajini](https://cinepixo.com/movies/ghajini-2005) - 2016 · [Akira](https://cinepixo.com/movies/akira-2016) - 2004 · [4 the People](https://cinepixo.com/movies/4-the-people-2004) - 2008 · [Dhaam Dhoom](https://cinepixo.com/movies/dhaam-dhoom-2008) - 2010 · [Varudu](https://cinepixo.com/movies/varudu-2010) - 2014 · [Action Jackson](https://cinepixo.com/movies/action-jackson-2014) ## Sources - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._D._Rajasekhar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaakha_Kaakha - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghajini_(2005_film) Every factual claim above is drawn from these. The reading of them is ours. Source: https://cinepixo.com/blog/r-d-rajasekhar-spent-two-months-taking-the-colour-out-of-ghajini Written for CinePixo. Nothing on this page is imported prose.