What is Grayscale?

[Ceryph]

So, I have an interesting question (at least to me since I never was a Graphic Design major) that I haven't been able to get clarified through searching the web.
Basically, is Grayscale a color space or a color palette?

According to these topics at Wikipedia (Color Space, Color Palette, Grayscale), I would say that Grayscale is a type of Color Palette. A Color Space is a mapping of a Color Palette.

[Albobo]

Not quite sure what you're asking, but "grayscale" is simply a range of luminosities with no hue. Starting with black as it blends gradually into white. No color.

Color palette is simply a set group of different colors. Very much so like a painter's palette, which might have red, blue, and yellow paint. Red, blue, yellow would be their color palette. Intensity, i.e. luminosity, is not added onto here. There are also no gradients; e.g., that red/blue/yellow color palette would not include purple, green or orange.

Color space describes a particular range of colors (with gradients). It's a little more complicated, but maybe this will help:
Introduction to Color Spaces

[Ceryph]

Maybe if I gave a bit of context as to what made me think of this.
One of our clients said this:
"In the coupon section please make the credit card box grayscale. The color is coming over kind of pinkish."

First of all, the color used is already a gray; I dunno how she is seeing pink. I know grays can be affected by colors around them by optical illusions that makes them appear to have a shade of some color in them, but I don't even see it in this situation. But I get this idea that people think "grayscale" is a color.

[tricky500]

All grayscale does is take color information and averages the luminosities and contrast to come up with the best monotone image. Greyscale = Monotone

If a client said the credit card box is coming over pinkish this would lead me to believe there is color there. A barcode is a solid color, usually black only. There should be no contaminating color, or other color there period.. You can create gray but really this is just a balance of RGB or CMYK which acheives gray but this does not mean its grayscale because its more than one color being used to create it.

[rhstanley3]

Specifically in photoshop, greyscale is a color scale. Examples of color scales are RGB and CMYK, which are Red Green Blue and Cyan Magenta Yellow Black. For each letter/color, there is 256 hues total, so there are 256 red hues, 256 blue hues, and 256 green hues. which when combined make a possibility of 16,777,216 hues (colors) in the RGB color scale. CMYK has 4,294,967,296 different hues. Greyscale, however, only has 256 color hues, mainly 254 different hues between pure white and pure black (even though the screen isn't capable of producing the blackest black, although it can try.) Put simply, greyscale is black and white and can't contain any other colors. if you want something in greyscale and you're working in photoshop, what i suggest is working in a color format and then afterwards converting to grayscale.


i hope that my ridiculous reply helped at all, but good luck!