Think of fashion, of smartphone colors, pen and pencil colors and the like. Gray, white, black, are just color choices among all the available colors. A gray T-shirt isn’t a desaturated colored T-shirt. It’s its own color.
Color is weird like. Gray is “all the visible spectrum in equal proportions”, which is white… just less white than the whitest thing visible but more white than the darkest (blackest) thing visible.
It’s a “color” because it’s useful to describe such a thing. If you had monitor entirely filled with 50% white you’d call it white. Only by comparing it to something brighter do you call it gray. Brown is the same thing. In a dark room if you looked at a monitor filled with red and green pixels you’d call it orange. Only when you start adding in clues like whites and brighter colors would you call it brown.
Anyway, yes grey is a color. But it is not quite the same as other colors. Other colors occupy only parts of the visible electromagnetic spectrum. Whites are the whole thing.
There is actually several very good technology connections videos about this stuff. Color is very cool!
...with varying definitions of "whole". D65 white is almost blue when compared to A white. It stops being either “all the visible spectrum" or "in equal proportions” pretty quickly once you look closer at it.
Oh, I understand what you say. But in color spaces, isn't gray the "sink" towards which desaturated colors shift? This would make it a location to avoid (unless you're purposefully desaturating).
> Aren't these in direct conflict? If you can't resaturate it, that implies it's not desaturated.
Kinda. There's a singularity in the math. The problem is that hue is defined as an angle and saturation is defined as distance from the center, but there's no consistent way to define a direction for the origin. Black and white have the same problem because they're also desaturated.
> And if you buy a forest motif, people will be upset if it's pink. That's just doing a tie-dye wrong, not a rebuke of whether it's a color at all.
I'm not arguing that it's not a color, just that it doesn't belong in all gradients!
Of course it doesn't belong in all gradients. It would only be in gradients that go from near-opposite colors. Or if you mean pure gray it would only be in gradients between exact opposite colors, and there are no good options for such a gradient.
I mention tie-dye because it feels like a quintessential example of a color gradient. I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask for a blue and orange tie-dye shirt and perfectly reasonable to not want grey colors simply because they're on opposite sides. I could see white in between, I could even see black, or I could see purple and red or cyan and yellow. I don't think there's a universally right answer here!
Someone asking for those colors doesn't actually want a gradient with two anchor points. So yes there are many answers but because it's not a quintessential example of a gradient.
It’s a “color” because it’s useful to describe such a thing. If you had monitor entirely filled with 50% white you’d call it white. Only by comparing it to something brighter do you call it gray. Brown is the same thing. In a dark room if you looked at a monitor filled with red and green pixels you’d call it orange. Only when you start adding in clues like whites and brighter colors would you call it brown.
Anyway, yes grey is a color. But it is not quite the same as other colors. Other colors occupy only parts of the visible electromagnetic spectrum. Whites are the whole thing.
There is actually several very good technology connections videos about this stuff. Color is very cool!