That white, washed-out sunrise is not a lack of color; it is a metering mistake. When the camera uses evaluative metering, it averages the whole frame, then lifts exposure so midtones look neutral, which silently forces bright clouds into sensor clipping and erases hue and gradient data.
The real shock comes when ISO drops and spot metering is aimed at the brightest cloud. Now exposure value is calculated from the highlight, protecting it just below saturation, and the sensor’s full dynamic range can be leveraged for subtle luminance and chroma shifts across the sky. Shadows fall, yes. Colors return, though. Magenta rims appear on cloud edges. Cyan transitions in the upper sky stop merging into white and start separating into distinct tonal steps, because photon counts are no longer pushed beyond the photosite capacity that records them as pure blank.
So the flat sheet was never the sky. It was your camera, asked to average away the drama you were actually looking at.
