Bleach Bypass Effect
Bleach bypass effect for photos and video: muted, silvery color and hard contrast, the gritty film look of war movies. From a light touch up to full strength.
What is bleach bypass?
Bleach bypass is a film lab trick. Color film is normally bleached during processing to strip out the silver, leaving only the color dyes. Skip that step, fully or in part, and the silver stays in the emulsion as a black-and-white image laid over the color one.
The result is muted color, deep blacks and harsh contrast, with the grain more visible. Cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, who had trained as a chemist, came up with it for Kon Ichikawa's film Her Brother in 1960. Labs later sold controllable versions under names like ENR, CCE and ACE, and it became the go-to look for war films and gritty thrillers.
How the effect copies the film process
It does digitally what the silver does on film. It takes the picture's brightness, pushes that gray copy to one and a half times the contrast around mid gray, and lays it over the color. Amount sets how much of the gray copy goes on top.
The presets are Light at 0.25, Bypass at 0.5 and Full at 1. Bypass is the classic grade, with about half the color left and shadows that start to crush. Light only cools things down a little, which suits a portrait you want moodier without losing skin tones.
Is bleach bypass the same as black and white?
Only at Full. With Amount at 1 no color is left, and the stretched contrast sends everything darker than about 17 percent brightness to pure black and everything brighter than about 83 percent to pure white. That's harsher than the Black and White Converter, which keeps its contrast where you set it.
Below Full, some of the original color always shows through, and that's the point of the look. Reds and skin tones turn brick-like and dusty instead of disappearing, and a blue sky goes steely.
Getting the most out of the look
The film version shows its grain, so add some from the Photo Filters hub after this effect, coarse rather than fine. The look also suits pictures with strong light and shadow already in them. A flat, overcast shot mostly just loses its color.
On video, the grade is the same on every frame, so one setting holds across a whole clip. If a face goes too dark, step Amount down toward 0.35 before you reach for anything else.