Turn Your iPhone Screen Black and White
About this QuickTip
Learn how to enable and customise grayscale mode on your iPhone to reduce distractions and make your screen easier to view at night. In this video, I’ll show you how to activate grayscale through Accessibility settings, link it to your action button for quick toggling and explore other uses like pairing it with Focus Modes or scheduling it to turn on automatically.
Transcript
Did you know you can actually turn your iPhone screen into grayscale mode to reduce distractions and make it easier to see at night? It’s really easy to enable, and if you have an action button on your phone, you can link it to the action button so simply pressing it will switch between normal mode and grayscale mode. Here’s how it works.
I’m going to open the Settings app and then go straight to Accessibility. From here, I’m looking for Display & Text Size. At the bottom of this screen is an option called Colour Filters. Tapping on it will bring up a screen with some coloured crayons at the top—ignore all of that, you don’t need them right now. All we’re going to do is toggle Colour Filters on.
From here, you’ve got several different options, which are quite helpful if you’re colour blind or want to change the tint of your screen. But for now, we’re going to tap on Grayscale and move the Intensity slider all the way to the right. As you can see, this makes our phone completely grayscale. If I come out of here and go back to my home screen, all of my app icons are in grayscale, and everything I do on my phone is now in black and white.
Next, I want to link this to my action button. So, I’ll jump back into Settings and choose Action Button. I’ll swipe sideways until I find the option for Accessibility. Then I’ll tap on it and choose which accessibility feature to link to that button—in this case, the Colour Filters we just configured. Now, whenever I use the action button, it will toggle the grayscale filter on or off, meaning I can easily enable this whenever I want to.
The other great thing is you can link this grayscale mode to other system settings, like Focus Modes, or schedule it to come on at a certain time of day. But those are things for another video! In the meantime, if you want to see hundreds more things your iPhone can do, please check out my channel and make sure to subscribe. There are hundreds more iPhone QuickTips waiting for you there. I’ll see you next time!
Technical details: This QuickTip was recorded on an iPhone 16 Pro Max running iOS 18.2 in December 2024.
The content used in this video is intended for educational and informational purposes only. All rights to the images, music, clips, and other media used belong to their respective owners. I do not claim ownership over any third-party content used. This video has not been authorised, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries and regions. iOS is a registered trademark of Cisco Systems Inc. Whilst I have done my best to list all applicable trademarks for this video, in the (hopefully unlikely) event that I have missed any you can find a full list of trademarks registered to Apple Inc. on their website. Finally, please note that whilst every effort has been made to ensure the information contained within this video was correct at time of publication, please be aware that as future updates and software changes occur some or all elements of this video may become outdated. I will endeavour to remove videos which are completely obsolete so as not to cause confusion!