Between Shades Of Gray

Understanding Color Grading Approaches for Neutral-Toned Projects

The phrase "Between Shades of Gray" comes from Ruta Sepetys's novel about Lithuanian deportations during the Stalin era, and it describes a pretty specific visual problem I run into constantly when color grading projects. The task is making something look desaturated and cold without flattening it into a featureless gray blob. Anyone who has tried this knows the difference between the two is much smaller than you'd think. I worked on a short documentary last year that needed this exact treatment. The footage was shot in golden-hour light, which is about the worst starting point for the aesthetic we were after. The director wanted that bleak, winter-overcast feel. We spent three days fixing it. Here is what I learned about the actual process.

Between Shades Of Gray: What It Actually Means in Practice

When people ask for "between shades of gray," they are usually asking for a look where color information is suppressed but not eliminated. The image retains a hint of chroma in the shadows and highlights, but the midtones lean neutral. It is not the same as throwing a desaturation filter on everything. That produces a flat, lifeless image. The trick is selective chroma control. The most common mistake beginners make is pulling saturation all the way down in the Lumetri Scopes or similar tools. You end up with something that looks like a black-and-white photo with a slight color cast, which is almost never what you actually want. Instead, you dial back saturation on specific ranges and rebuild contrast separately. This gives you control over where color lives in the frame. I use a combination of HSL qualifiers and a curves layer to do this. First, I identify the dominant hues in the shot and drop their saturation by about forty to sixty percent. Then I use a curves adjustment to restore contrast in the luminance channel without bringing the color back. The result is an image that reads as desaturated but still has depth. It took me about eight minutes per scene to get this right once I stopped trying to do it in one pass.

There is an edge case that catches most people. When you suppress color in a scene with skin tones, you tend to make people look sick rather than bleak. I dealt with this on a project where the main subject had warm olive skin. The HSL approach was turning her completely gray. The workaround was to use a secondary qualifier that isolated just the orange and red ranges, lowered saturation there by only twenty percent, and then applied a global desaturation to the blues and greens. This preserved the natural appearance of the skin while still achieving the overall mood. It added about ten minutes of work per shot but saved the entire sequence from looking wrong. Another thing nobody warns you about is how this look interacts with noise. Desaturated footage reveals grain structure much more obviously. A clean-looking shot can start to look muddy after you pull saturation down because the noise becomes visible in the midtones where color used to be hiding it. I always run a light denoise pass before doing the grade, or I accept that the final image will have a grittier texture than the original. That is sometimes a feature, not a bug, but you should know about it beforehand. If you are working in DaVinci Resolve, the Finesse tab on the Color Wheels helps a lot. Set the grain level to around five and the sharpening to eight. It gives the image a bit more structure after desaturation. In Premiere, the equivalent is the Vibrance slider paired with a contrast curve. Vibrance is smarter than Saturation because it targets less-saturated colors first. Use that as your primary tool and only reach for Saturation if you need to go further.

The downside of this approach is that it does not work on poorly exposed footage. If your shadows are crushed or your highlights are blown, no amount of grading will recover detail. I once tried to salvage a scene where the camera had clipped the highlights on a snowy landscape. Even with careful recovery, the result looked washed out and artificial. In those cases, it is better to shoot it again or accept the limitations of the material. I also found that this look requires more monitoring than most grading tasks. On a small laptop screen, everything looks fine. On a calibrated monitor or a larger display, the differences become obvious. I always compare the graded version side by side with the original at full resolution before considering a shot done. This adds time but prevents costly rework later. For reference material, the novel and the 2013 film adaptation both use a desaturated palette that leans cool blue in the shadows. Studying those frames can help you calibrate your own monitors to the target look. The film especially does a good job of maintaining skin tone readability while keeping the overall image cold.

The files and presets associated with this technique are available through various freelance grading communities. There is no single official download, but several professionals share LUTs and node setups that approximate the look. I tend to build my own versions rather than relying on pre-made packs because every source clip has different characteristics. A preset that works on Canon C300 log footage might look terrible on RED R3D material. Custom grading remains the most reliable path, even if it takes longer upfront.