Steel Blue Grey

Cold colour with no warm note anywhere removes every comfort from a frame without adding anything dramatic. It reads as a place somebody has to be rather than a place somebody chose.

The single olive is what keeps it from going achromatic. One dull hue tells the eye this is a real world with the colour drained out of it, not a black and white picture.

Choose cold surfaces rather than a cold grade. Concrete, steel, glass, wet tarmac, grey paint, grey cloth.

Light it overcast. A diffuse white sky gives no direction and no warmth, and it is what makes the surfaces read as their own colour.

Add one dull olive or khaki on a small area. That single hue is the difference between a drained world and a greyscale one.

Use it for anything institutional, bureaucratic or bleak: an office, a corridor, a housing block, a border, a surveillance scene, a city in winter.

Leave it alone when you want the viewer on the character's side. There is nothing in this palette that can be warm toward anybody.

Desaturation in the cinematic catalogue is a grade: the colour is pulled out of finished footage. This is a palette, so the surfaces were cold before anybody shot them, and the olive survives on purpose.

An achromatic palette has no hue at all. This one keeps a blue in the greys and one olive, which is what makes it read as a place rather than as a photograph.

European cinema of the 2000s used it for anything about the state, and British espionage took it wholesale. It works because it is what a northern city in February actually looks like, so nobody has to be told what it means.

A warm picture arrives with a blue wash on top and the skin goes grey-orange. Say the surfaces themselves are cold, not the grade.

Direct sun appears through a window. Say the light is overcast with no direct sun and no amber highlight.