What is the meaning of high-grade ash in photography?

High-grade gray in photography refers to a color tone, which often appears in indoor design color matching and fashion portrait photography, and is also common in outdoor cloudy and modern fair-faced concrete architectural photography.

High-grade gray, as the name implies, the overall picture is mainly gray, and the tone is elegant, giving people a very unique feeling, and this uniqueness often symbolizes a high aesthetic accomplishment, which is called "advanced".

High-grade ash has three main characteristics:

First, the saturation is low.

Second, the tone is unified and harmonious, with a small amount of warm colors embellished.

Third, the tone is soft, and there is no dead black or white place.

Here are some pictures found on the Internet to explain them one by one.

First, the saturation is low.

The following indoor photos are all low saturation tones. When toning, once the saturation is reduced, all colors are gray. When all colors are close to low saturation, the whole will appear gray.

(Image source:/a/154076465 _ 99915876)

Second, the tone is unified and harmonious, with a small amount of warm colors embellished.

Let's take indoor architectural photography as an example. If the whole picture is black and gray, the color is similar, and there is no bright color. After watching it for a long time, there will still be aesthetic fatigue, especially when the overall saturation is low, there will often be a sense of smog.

At this time, you need to find a bright color (usually warm color) in the picture as an ornament, such as dark coffee, logs, wine red, green and so on. Similarly, the saturation of bright spots should not be too high-in fact, if you want to highlight a certain color in color matching, you don't need to adjust its saturation very high, because in the case of low saturation, the saturation and lightness of the two colors are relative, as long as they are slightly higher than other colors in the picture to form color contrast.

(Image source:/a/154076465 _ 99915876)

Third, the tone is soft, and there is no dead black or white place.

This is a recent UAV work by Thomas, a famous landscape photographer. This was shot in Suzhou in the snow. You can see that the whole work is soft in color, as if shrouded in a faint halo, unlike the hdr effect that is often criticized in landscape photography, that is, high contrast and high dynamic range. Although the tone is soft, the relationship between light and shade is still very rich.

(Screenshot source:/16379650/)

If we can grasp these characteristics and practice hard in the later color matching, I believe we can bring out good high-grade gray tablets.