Douglas was born in Los Angeles. He is the son of Donald Trumbull who created visual effects for the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz as well as later movies including Silent Running and Star Wars.

Douglas Trumbull's early work was at Graphic Films in Los Angeles. The small animation and graphic arts studio produced a film called To the Moon and Beyond about spaceflight for the 1964 New York World's Fair. Trumbull, the son of a mechanical Engineer and an Artist, worked at Graphic Films as an Illustrator and airbrush Artist. The spaceflight film caught the attention of Director Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick hired Director Con Pederson from Graphic Films, and Trumbull then cold-called Kubrick after obtaining the director's home phone number from Pederson. Kubrick hired Trumbull for the production of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Trumbull's first task was to create the dozens of animations seen in the data display screens in the Aries moon shuttle and the Discovery. They looked like computer graphics, but they were created by photographing and animating reproductions of charts and graphs from technical publications. Trumbull initially created the shots using a number of Rube Goldberg-like contraptions he built with gears and motors ordered from a scientific equipment supply house. Kubrick gave the young effects technician creative freedom and encouragement: "He would say ... 'What do you need to do it?' and I would have complete carte blanche, which was wild as a young guy", Trumbull recalled. "I was 23–24 when I started the movie, and was 25 by the time I was doing the Star Gate. He would say, 'What do you need?' and I'd say, 'Well, I need to go into town and buy some weird bearings and some stuff' and he would send me off to town in his Bentley, with a driver, into London. It was great!"

In 1969 Trumbull was filming the annual Flying Saucer Convention in Giant Rock California. This evolved into a full length project initially called Giant Rock, Rutabaga Deluxe, and then Saturation 70: An Ecological Horror Fantasy. The star of the film was a five year old Jason Jones, who was the son of Brian Jones, of Rolling Stones fame. The story involved Jones losing his mother in a giant garbage dump and wandering a desolate planet looking for her while being menaced by gas-masked garbage men and helped by a fairy godmother in a sequined cowgirl creation by Nudie. Some footage includes a battle with a Green Beret and a Viet Cong in a supermarket. Trumbull's partner on the film was Anthony Foutz. A company called Dimension V took over backing of the film.

Trumbull's participation and success on Andromeda set him up to direct the 1971 film Silent Running, with a script based on his original treatment: America's last great forests are preserved and sent into space inside huge geodesic domes, in the hope that one day they can be returned to an earth that can once again sustain them. When orders are issued by faceless bureaucrats to abandon and destroy the domes, the ship's Botanist (Bruce Dern) rebels and takes over the ship, aided by three anthropomorphic "drone" robots. He steers the ship away from the fleet and hides among the rings of Saturn, out of contact (silent running), attempting to keep the forest in good health, alone except for the drones who follow him around like pets.

In 1975, Trumbull turned down an offer to provide the effects for George Lucas' Star Wars due to other commitments, but in 1977 he contributed effects to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In late 1978, Trumbull's Future General Corporation, a research/special effects house that was funded by Gulf + Western and Paramount Pictures, was offered the job to produce the special effects for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Trumbull, already deeply involved in Close Encounters, refused, wanting instead to focus his efforts on his patented Showscan process, a high-speed, large-format movie process that provided unprecedented visual clarity. Paramount awarded the contract to effects house Robert Abel and Associates, and in a move seen by some as payback for Trumbull's refusal to take on the project, all but shuttered Future General.

Abel had produced many high-end, visually advanced commercials for clients such as 7-Up, but it soon became apparent that their choice of Technology, which featured software-controlled camera rigs and graphics imaging systems very advanced for the day, simply couldn't scale up to the volume of material required. In August 1978, with rumors of an impending meltdown at Abel swirling, Trumbull approached Paramount offering to step in and do the effects with partner Richard Yuricich. Paramount declined, hoping that Abel could still work a miracle.

Early in 1979, and with principal photography nearly finished and a December release date looming, Abel was fired after failing to produce even a few seconds of usable footage. Paramount approached Trumbull to take over effects production, which Trumbull did after securing an agreement to be released from his contract at Paramount upon completion of the film. "At the time", he recalled, "I think they would have entertained anyone who could have pulled them out of the jam." Trumbull reassembled his Future General team, rebuilt his facility which Paramount had nearly gutted, and with a mere six months to create the hundreds of effects shots needed, worked virtually around the clock for months. His team made the date, but their in-house battle cry became "... crop it, flop it, or drop it!" (That is, re-use part of an existing scene, take an existing scene and "flop" it over so that a right-to-left shot of the ship now plays the other way, or "drop" the shot from the script altogether.)

In 1981 Trumbull directed the special effects for the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner. By this time Trumbull had sworn off doing special effects for other Directors, but was lured to the project by the opportunity to work with Scott, and a chance to create something other than sterile, grey and white spacecraft. "One of the things that appealed to me about the project", Trumbull recalled in an interview in Cinefex magazine, "was that it was NOT a space movie. I'm just real tired of doing spaceships against star backgrounds." Indeed, the iconic images of a polluted, dystopian Los Angeles, looking more like an oil refinery than a metropolis, and complete with building-sized electronic billboards and a bulbous blimp circling overhead advertising "Off World" job opportunities became the film's visual trademarks. (Despite the experience and professionalism of Trumbull's disciples, not everything went smoothly. According to Cinefex magazine, a young model maker was giving his girlfriend a tour of the effects shop, and he noticed that a large model of a building being photographed in the "smoke room" – a sealed room specially constructed to provide a smoky atmosphere – was burning fiercely. Thinking this was just another effect, he mentioned it in passing to a supervisor, who immediately grabbed an extinguisher and ran to put out the fire. The plastic and fiberglass model had been mounted too close to a powerful light which eventually set it ablaze.)

In 1994 Trumbull was briefly a Vice Chairman of IMAX Corporation and President of its Ridefilm division through his involvement in the simultaneous combination and takeover of the Canadian-based private company Imax Corp. and Trumbull Co.

The model of the Enterprise, already built by the time Trumbull's team took over, proved especially Tricky. While the model of Discovery in "2001" was over 50 feet long and featured a wealth of detail (from parts gleaned from, among other things, hundreds of plastic model tank kits), the model of the Enterprise was only seven feet in length, which severely limited the photographic possibilities. Other compromises had to be overcome. Trumbull had several ideas for unconventional effects – such as a modified slitscan technique to produce fantastic streaks when the Enterprise went into warp drive, but many had to be shelved due to time constraints. Trumbull also made several contributions to the story line, in collaboration once again with his Andromeda Strain Director Robert Wise.

Trumbull was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010, citing first his stature as "innovative master of special effects". He has been nominated for Academy Awards on three occasions and has received the American Society of Cinematographer's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Trumbull received the International Press Academy's Tesla award in December 2011, named in honor of Nikola Tesla, an Inventor, scientist and Engineer, who, Trumbull noted dryly in a runway interview, "Died penniless, after lots of people took credit for his work." He went on to say that he hopes it doesn't turn out that way for him. Trumbull also received the Gordon E. Sawyer Award in February 2012, an honorary Academy Award given to an "individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry", as well as the Georges Méliès award from the Visual Effects Society in the same month.

Trumbull was a guest speaker at the Massachusetts Production Coalition in February 2013.

Trumbull has been honored by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) on two separate occasions. Most recently, he received the Progress Medal in recognition of his numerous contributions to photographic processes and technologies in visual effects (VFX) and HFR cinematography. Trumbull conducted pioneering biometric research on audience response to HFR imaging and developed a novel cinematic process using 65mm film at 60 frames per second that resulted in a “Giant Screen” 70mm image with extraordinarily high definition along with smoother and more realistic motion rendering. His work continues to advance stereoscopic 3D and digital HFR imaging including his 120FPS Magi single-camera/single projector “lens-to-lens” system that harnesses existing cameras, post-production tools, and projectors to deliver images and sound that are almost indistinguishable from reality. The Progress Medal is the most prestigious SMPTE award, and it recognizes outstanding technical contributions to the progress of engineering phases of the motion picture, television, or motion-imaging industries. The honor was conferred upon Trumbull at the SMPTE Centennial Gala on 28 October 2016 at the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Hollywood. In 2011, he received the SMPTE Presidential Proclamation, which recognizes individuals of established and outstanding status and reputation in the motion-picture, television, and motion-imaging industries worldwide. Trumbull was honored for his more than 45 years of pioneering work in visual effects photography and groundbreaking innovation in motion picture technologies.