if black is all colors and white is no colors what is gray?
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Gray is all colors but less saturated. The black-to-white is a scale of saturation. You can easily see this in any graphics editor or application.
You have it the wrong way around. White is all colours, black is no colors. Grey is the same amount of red green and blue. If you mix all colours, it’s shit brown.
Gray is the color of a material that reflects uniformly across the spectrum in lesser intensity than another object of reference nearby, which would be deemed lighter gray or white. The brightness of stuff is relative. Suppose you had a piece of worn cloth that could be described as white in isolation, but you put new office paper near it and it was whiter still. Gray material has pigment scattered through it that aborbs some light.
important to distinguish between mixing paint and mixing light. Mixing paint, like how a printer works (subtractive colour mixing) if you add all the colours together you get brown, and white would be not using any colour at all. On the other hand Additive colour mixing, as you get with light, white is a mixture of all the colours and black is no colour (no light) at all. grey would be equal amounts of all colours but a bit less of them.
Its the exact opposite actually.
The way colors work, is our eyes receive light and interpreter the frequency of the light wave as a color.
Our eyes usually receive many light waves at once with different frequency.
We see white when our eyes receive all of the light frequencies at once. Black is when we receive no light at all.
So I guess grey is we receive all the frequencies, but very small amount of them
An important note first; this only applies to digital color, as in the real world shadows just inherit the color of the surface they’re on, and in inks, you can’t create black and white, they have to be their own separate channels.
But with digital color, it works. Color is created with light using three channels: red, green, and blue. With brightness values that range from 0-255 (this is more of a technical limitation, but it still works.) When you want a pixel to make a certain color, you just adjust the brightness values of each of those three colors. Fun fact, unless you’re creating red, green, blue, or white, the maximum brightness of any true color is only 50%, as going any higher would desaturate it.
Anyway; so the way you create shades of grey is by setting each color to the same brightness value, as that will make them evenly mix and create white, but darker if it’s not all the way at 255.
Grey is dark white.
Any white instantly becomes grey when you put it next to a brighter white.
Brighter here means “more photons per units of area”. The photons remain an equal mix of all visible colors.
I think you have it the wrong way around. If there is no light of any color you get black, if you have a full spectrum of light you get white. Gray is just white at a lower exposure.
Paint: for the purpose of mixing paint, white is a color because it’s a pigment.
Print: all colors mixed in a specific combination.
Light: white, but in a shadow.
The way your computer screen, phone screen, TV screen or basically any electronic dilevice shows an image is by producing light in either red, green, blue, or a combination of them. The standard uses a range from 0-255 for each of the three colors. RGB(0,0,255) is blue. RGB(0,255,255) is cyan. RGB(90,10,100) will be a deep, royal purple… Anyway, In this case, mixing all the colors together, RGB(255,255,255) is how they show white. And none of the colors RGB(0,0,0) is how they show black. Any time all three numbers are the same, the color is considered grayscale. So RGB(20,20,20) will be a dark grey and RGB(200,200,200) will be a light grey.
Light is much simpler than pigments. Pigments work by absorbing most light and reflecting a particular color. Since the incident light is typically white light, a combination of all colors, then pigments can be tuned to show any of them (technically the sun emits a bit better in yellow and it tails off either side, but the spectrum is broad enough we can treat it as white). You were taught in elementary school that red, yellow, and blue were the primary colors for pigments, which is close, but imperfect. A better set of primary colors is what your printer uses, CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black. Each one absorbs one of red, green, or blue light and reflects primarily the third. Cyan as I said above is a combination of blue and green, so it absorbs red. Magenta is a mixture of red and blue light, do it absorbs green. Yellow is a combination of red and green (I know, that’s the hardest one to think about but it’s halfway between red and green on the rainbow, so it makes some sense) so it absorbs blue. And when I say ‘it absorbs’ I mean that pigment. Now, you can imagine how mixing yellow and cyan make green. Both of them reflect green, but cyan absorbs red and yellow absorbs blue. The only color left is green. That’s why you’re taught blue and yellow make green… I’m really not sure why elementary school thinks kids can’t handle the colors cyan and magenta…
So black, white, and gray. Yes, in this case, white pigments will reflect all colors together, and black will absorb all colors, reflecting none. So mixing all the pigments “should” make black, but this is an imperfect world where the pigments are all slightly preferential towards one or the other of their absorbed colors, leaving some brown sludge most likely. That’s why printers use that 4th cartridge of black toner. To print grey, all it does is use less toner. Either by making a thinner layer or by spreading out or shrinking the dots a bit more, depending on the technology behind the printer. I bet if you print out a grey scale image on a printer and look at it under a microscope, there will be millions of tiny black dots. The darker parts will have bigger and/or closer dots while lighter sections the opposite. Any part that is full black the toner may overlap, or just be the maximum amount designed to print. Any places that are white will just show the paper, no dots.
Most normal grey objects like rock or grey paint or cement should be considered a bad white (not an off white that’s kinda more yellowed). They reflect all colors equally, but not very well. They absorb some of them. To be clear, the whitest white thing you’ve ever seen in your life probably still absorbs a bit. So it could be replicated on a screen as RGB(254,254,254), but we can’t tell the difference. And similarly, if a rock reflects just a tad more blue, since this isn’t a perfect world, it might be replicated on screen as RGB(87,87,89) but they’re so close you can’t distinguish it from grey.
And one last note for you, light does not only come in three colors. The light emitted from the sun is a huge spectrum. We can only see wavelengths between about 450 to 780nm which form the rainbow from indigo to red. Yellow light can be either a mixture of red (780nm) and green(532nm) or it can be a pure yellow photon (≈580nm, just a guess). Our vision works on those primary three colors, red green and blue light. So we can be tricked by merging two colors like that. So when I say a rock reflects all colors equally and then say it is represented on screen by some RGB value, I really do mean it’s just a representation. Looking at the readout from a spectroscope would show you they are not identical, even though we were humans can’t tell the difference. This also means that some colors we see are not real photons of light that can exist. As I said, yellow is halfway between red and green, so the red cones and green cones in your retina both activate a little bit. (There is some overlap of the wavelengths that will activate them but they are labeled by the peak of that curve.) But since green is between red and blue, it’s impossible for a single photon to activate both red and blue without activating green. We would see magenta (or really, there are a whole house of colors including pretty much all shades and tints of pink, most purples, and up to the mauve/maroon index) that are only perceptible because of the way humans interpret colors. Photons of these colors cannot exist.
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