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How to turn your phone screen to grayscale

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iPhone with grayscale screen against a colorful illustrated background.
Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

With the exception of old movies, most of us are used to seeing our screens in full color. However, grayscale — in which you see nothing but black, white, or shades of gray — can be useful, even when it comes to your smartphone.

To begin with, people who are intensely colorblind will find a screen that has been switched to grayscale much easier to work with (since otherwise, certain colors can be difficult to distinguish). It may be good for the rest of us as well because grayscale is said to be much easier on the eyes — so using it at night could give your optics a rest. (In addition, forcing all your videos to go grayscale might finally convince you to put down the phone and get some sleep). If used during the day, you might be less tempted to pick up your phone rather than pay attention to your work or other parts of your life.

Here’s how to switch the displays on your iPhone, Samsung Galaxy phone, and Google Pixel to grayscale. (If you have an Android phone from a different manufacturer, the directions should be similar to that for the Pixel.)

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Grayscale on an iPhone

Switching your screen to Grayscale on the iPhone is a very simple process. Currently, you can find it as a feature in the Accessibility section.

You won’t see the options for Color Filters until you toggle it on.
When you toggle Grayscale on, the result is a fully grayscale screen.

There are also various ways you can trigger grayscale on and off using your iPhone’s Shortcuts. To begin with, if you want to trigger it via a triple-click on your side (power) button:

Once you’ve set grayscale as your color filter, you can create an Accessibility Shortcut for that filter.
You can add an Accessibility Shortcut to your Control Center.

To add a button to your Control Center, first set up the Accessibility Shortcut as described above. Then:

You can also create a grayscale Shortcut, which you can then turn on at certain times, such as during Sleep mode or when you’re in Focus mode. To create the Shortcut:

You can create a Shortcut that will turn your color filters (i.e., the grayscale filter) on.
When you enable this automation, your screen will go to grayscale when Bedtime starts.

If you want to automatically turn on grayscale at night or associate it with a Focus Mode during working hours, then you can also do that via the Shortcuts app. For example, let’s say you want to create a Shortcut that will turn on grayscale at night when you’re supposed to be sleeping:

You can use the Shortcuts app to set all sorts of automations or other ways to enable or disable grayscale (or other conditions). Go ahead and experiment.

Grayscale on a Google Pixel phone

If you use a Pixel or other Android phone, you can have two different ways that you can adjust the screen to go to grayscale, depending on what you want to use it for.

If you want to go grayscale at night to relax your eyes (or discourage yourself from using your phone), you can use Android’s Bedtime mode to have your phone automatically go to grayscale at a specific time. (If you haven’t set up Bedtime mode yet, here are some instructions.)

To set up Bedtime mode for grayscale, tap on Customize.
There are several screen options for bedtime, including grayscale and dim the wallpaper.

What if you want the screen to be grayscale all the time — or if you want to be able to toggle it on and off any time you wish? This is possible as well by using the color correction feature in Android’s Accessibility toolkit.

If you want to switch to grayscale anytime you like but don’t want to go through all those menu choices each time, you can make it easier by using your Quick Settings menu or by adding a small “accessibility button” that will continuously float on your screen. In either case, keep in mind that grayscale isn’t the only type of color correction available, and so before you set either of these options, you need to go to the Color correction menu as described above and select Grayscale.

The color correction menu lets you turn all your screens to grayscale.
The accessibility button on the right side of the screen will toggle color on and off.

To add color correction to the Quick Settings menu:

To create an accessibility button:

(Interestingly, I found that when I created the accessibility button, my Pixel 6 automatically added Color correction to my Quick settings menu.)

Grayscale on a Samsung Galaxy phone

Similar to the Pixel, Samsung has a Sleep mode. However, Samsung’s mode automatically goes into grayscale mode (rather than giving you any other choices).

When Sleep mode goes on, your screen will automatically go to grayscale.
Samsung’s accessibility tools let you turn your screen grayscale at any time.

Samsung also has a way to turn on grayscale using its accessibility tools.

You can also turn grayscale on and off using the Color correction tile in your Samsung’s Quick Settings menu. As with other Android phones, you should first set your color adjustment to grayscale in the Accessibility area.

Source: The Verge How to turn your phone screen to grayscale

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