Bleach bypass
A desaturated, high-contrast film look with dense blacks and extra grain, modeled on leaving silver in the developed film.
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What it is
Bleach bypass skips or reduces film-lab bleaching, leaving metallic silver beside the color dyes. The dense monochrome image lowers saturation, raises contrast, deepens blacks, and exposes grain.
Saving Private Ryan and Minority Report made the cold look familiar; Technicolor called its process ENR. Digital grades mimic it with desaturation, contrast, and grain.
Gotcha: it is not just desaturation, and it is not just contrast. Crush the shadows and clip the highlights and you throw away the very texture the retained silver exists to reveal, leaving hard empty patches where dense, detailed blacks should be. Protect skin tone and shadow detail while shaping a firm, not empty, black point.
Ask AI for it
Create a bleach-bypass color grade: reduce saturation to about 35 percent, add a high-contrast monochrome luminance copy over the color image using a restrained overlay blend, deepen the blacks without crushing texture, hold highlight detail, and add fine silver-like film grain. Keep skin recognizable but muted.