what's special about grey?
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- Published on Friday, 10 December 2010 20:07
- Last Updated on Wednesday, 25 January 2012 15:19
- Written by Ric Morte
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you might want to read the previous article: what's special about grey?
you might also be interested in these articles: where is middle grey? | what is a grey card?
Before reading this article you should already be familiar with the article entitled "the dimension of light & dark". Additionally we will refer to two colour-space models known as "Hue, Saturation and Lightness" (HSL) and "Red-Green-Blue" (RGB). There is little point in proceeding with the present discussion until you are familiar with the basic concepts covered in these two related articles.
brief recap
We have already discussed the terms "white", "grey" and "black" in the article: "the dimension of light & dark". These three terms can only refer to a surface, the only difference between the them being the extent to which they reflect or absorb light. White and black are the polar opposites of a completely neutral scale with all the shades of grey inbetween. These greys have no hue whatsoever: they are achromatic.
So is there anything special about grey? Well yes there is, in fact two things:
- a grey surface will reflect back a fixed proportion of the incident light
- a grey surface will reflect exactly the same colour (hue) as the incident light
These two properties make "grey" unique anongst all the colours
grey as a neutral absorber
We know that the various shades of grey reflect light, if they didn't we would call them black. The question is: how much light do greys reflect?
