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matt_0942
Participant
July 13, 2025
Answered

Looking for a way to effectively darken white to gray

  • July 13, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 348 views

I make videos where I darken scenes using brightness and contrast to lower brightness, then have the scenes light back up, again, based on music using Sound Keys.

 

The problem I run into a lot is that white does not darken the way everything else does by lowering brightness. I use hue / saturation at times to lower lightness but that usually leaves it looking a flat and unnatural gray.

 

I know I can using masking and adjustment layers to lower exposure or other tricks, but I am looking for a way that will simply allow me to use an effect or plugin that will handle the white for me without masks or isolating all of the white elements in the scene. 

 

I am less interested in realism than the need to have the white appear visually like all of the colors and react with brighness in a nearly identical way so that the viewers' eyes do not get drawn to the white areas due to a seeming contrast to how colors react when the dark to light shift happens with sound keys.

 

Not sure if I explained that well enough

 

Thanks

Correct answer Conrad_C

Thank you!!!


I updated the demo to be clearer in two ways: It now uses hold keyframes to make it easier to see what happens to the white point as the values are reduced each way, and it now shows the scopes to see that same effect graphically in both examples.

1 reply

Conrad_C
Community Expert
Conrad_CCommunity Expert
Community Expert
July 13, 2025

Not sure if I understand the problem properly, but is it a case where the white part of the image doesn’t go completely black when you set Brightness to its minimum?

 

If so, is it practical to darken by animating Opacity instead? If not, how about by animating the Output White property of the Levels (Individual Controls) effect, as shown in the demo below?

 

Or is the nature of the problem different than that?

 

M
matt_0942Author
Participant
July 13, 2025

Hi. No. So when using brightness and contrast in some scenes, I set the brightness to lets say -90. This fully darkens all colors as well as gray. But white doesnt really darken, itself, to a gray. It kind of seems to get less bright but not in equal proportion, it seems, to colors and gray. 

Conrad_C
Community Expert
Conrad_CCommunity Expert
Community Expert
July 13, 2025

That’s kind of what I’m showing in the demo. I probably wasn’t specific enough in what that demo shows. Both show a property being animated from their default values (Brightness 0 on the left, Output White 255 on the right) to their minimum values (Brightness -150 and Output White 0) over a 5-second period. In the example on the right, darkening can make white darker consistent with other tones, (and if you want) all the way to solid black…that’s what you’re after, right?

 

I think the reason white is gray at minimum Brightness is that, as in many applications, Brightness darkens by dropping the middle value, which in Levels is called Gamma. Because it’s the middle value that’s moved, the midtones darken to a much higher degree than the black point or white point. By specifically animating Output White instead, the value of white can be set down to any gray level you want, all the way down to black, as shown on the right in the demo.

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