What is "grayscale"

1. (label en imaging) black and white, representing color with shades of gray. alt. (context photography English) A printed strip of graduated tones used to check exposure and development times. n. (context photography English) A printed strip of graduated tones used to check exposure and development times. v

2. (context transitive English) To convert to grayscale.

In photography and computing, a grayscale or greyscale digital image is an image in which the value of each pixel is a single sample, that is, it carries only intensity information. Images of this sort, also known as black-and-white, are composed exclusively of shades of gray, varying from black at the weakest intensity to white at the strongest.

Grayscale images are distinct from one-bit bi-tonal black-and-white images, which in the context of computer imaging are images with only two colors, black and white (also called bilevel or binary images). Grayscale images have many shades of gray in between.

Grayscale images are often the result of measuring the intensity of light at each pixel in a single band of the electromagnetic spectrum (e.g. infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, etc.), and in such cases they are monochromatic proper when only a given frequency is captured. But also they can be synthesized from a full color image; see the section about converting to grayscale.