Monochrome

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Monochrome

Monochrome comes from the Greek

Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
µ??????µ?? (monochromos), meaning “of one color”, which is a combination of µ???? (monos), meaning “alone” or “solitary”, and ???µa (chroma), meaning “color”. Monochromatic light is light of a single wavelength, though in practice it can refer to light of a narrow wavelength range. A monochromatic object or image is one whose range of colors consists of shades of a single color

Color

Color or colour is the visual perception property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, yellow, blue and others....
or hue

Hue

Hue is one of the main properties of a color described with names such as "red", "yellow", etc. The two other main properties are lightness and colorfulness....
; monochrome images in neutral colors are also known as grayscale

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....
or black-and-white

Black-and-white

Black-and-white is a number of monochrome forms in visual arts. Most forms of visual technology start out in black and white, then slowly evolve into color as technology progresses....
.

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Physics

Physics is the natural science which examines basic concepts such as energy, force, and spacetime and all that derives from these, such as mass, charge, matter and its Motion ....
, the word "monochromatic" is used more generally to refer to electromagnetic radiation

Electromagnetic radiation

Electromagnetic radiation takes the form of wave propagation waves in a vacuum or in matter. EM radiation has an electric field and magnetic field component which oscillate in phase perpendicular to each other and to the direction of energy Wave propagation....
of a single wavelength

Wavelength

In physics, wavelength is the distance between repeating units of a propagating wave of a given frequency. It is commonly designated by the Greek language letter lambda ....
.

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Encyclopedia

Monochrome comes from the Greek

Greek language

Color

Color or colour is the visual perception property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, yellow, blue and others....
or hue

Hue

Grayscale

Black-and-white

Black-and-white is a number of monochrome forms in visual arts. Most forms of visual technology start out in black and white, then slowly evolve into color as technology progresses....
.

Theory

In physics

Physics

Electromagnetic radiation

Wavelength

In physics, wavelength is the distance between repeating units of a propagating wave of a given frequency. It is commonly designated by the Greek language letter lambda ....
. In the physical sense, no real source of electromagnetic radiation is purely monochromatic, since that would require a wave

Wave

A wave is a disturbance that propagates through space and time, usually with transference of energy. While a mechanical wave exists in a medium , waves of electromagnetic radiation can travel through vacuum, that is, without a medium....
of infinite duration as a consequence of the Fourier transform's localization property

Fourier transform

In mathematics, Fourier analysis is a subject area which grew out of the study of Fourier series. The subject began with trying to understand when it was possible to represent general functions by sums of simpler trigonometric functions....
(cf. spectral coherence

Coherence (physics)

In physics, coherence is a property of waves, that enables stationary interference. More generally, coherence describes all correlation properties between physical quantities of a wave....
). Even sources such as laser

Laser

A laser is a device that emits light through a process called stimulated emission. The term laser is an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation....
s have some narrow range of wavelengths (known as the spectral linewidth

Spectral linewidth

The spectral linewidth characterizes the width of a spectral line, such as in the emission spectrum of an atom, or the frequency spectrum of an acoustic or electronic system....
) within which they operate. In practice, filtered light, diffraction grating

Diffraction grating

In optics, a diffraction grating is an optical component with a regular pattern, which splits light into several beams travelling in different directions....
separated light and laser light are all routinely referred to as monochromatic. Often light sources can be compared and one be labeled as “more monochromatic” (in a similar usage as monodispersity). And a device which isolates light sources of a narrow bandwidth are called monochromator

Monochromator

A monochromator is an optics device that transmits a mechanically selectable narrow band of wavelengths of light or other radiation chosen from a wider range of wavelengths available at the input....
s, even though the bandwidth is often explicitly specified, and thus a collection of wavelengths is understood.

Application

For an image

Image

An image is an artifact, usually two-dimensional , that has a similar appearance to some subject —usually a physical object or a person....
, the term monochrome is usually taken to mean the same as black

Black

Black is the color of objects that do not emit or reflection light in any part of the visible spectrum; they absorb all such frequencies of light....
-and-white

White

White is a color, the Color vision#Physiology of color perception which is evoked by light that stimulates all three types of color sensitive cone cells in the human eye in near equal amount and with high brightness compared to the surroundings....
or, more likely, grayscale

Grayscale

Green

Green is a color, the perception of which is evoked by light having a spectrum dominated by energy with a wavelength of roughly 520?570-Nanometre....
-and-white or green-and-black. It may also refer to sepia displaying tones from light tan to dark brown or cyanotype

Cyanotype

Cyanotype is a photographic process that gives a cyan print.The English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel discovered this procedure in 1842....
(“blueprint”) images, and early photographic methods such as Ambrotype

Ambrotype

The ambrotype process or amphitype is a photography process that creates a positive photographic image on a sheet of glass using the wet plate collodion process....
, Tintype

Tintype

Tintype, also melainotype and ferrotype, is a photograph made by creating a direct positive on a sheet of metal, usually iron or steel that is blackened by painting, laquering or enamelling and is used as a support for a collodion photographic emulsion....
and Daguerreotype

Daguerreotype

A daguerreotype is an early type of photograph, developed by Louis Daguerre, in which the image is exposed directly onto a mirror-polished surface of silver bearing a coating of silver halide particles deposited by iodine vapor....
, each of which may be used to produce a monochromatic image.

In computing, monochrome has two meanings:

it may mean having only one color which is either on or off,
allowing shades of that color, although the latter is more correctly known as grayscale.

A monochrome computer display

Computer display

A visual display unit, often called simply a monitor or display, is a piece of electrical equipment which displays images generated from the video output of devices such as computers, without producing a permanent record....
is able to display only a single color, often green, amber

Amber (color)

Amber is an orange -yellow color that got its name from the material known as amber. Due to this, amber can refer not to one but to a series of shades of orange , since the natural material varies from nearly yellow when newer to orange or reddish-orange when older....
, red

Red

Red is any of a number of similar colors evoked by light consisting predominantly of the longest wavelengths of light discernible by the human eye, in the wavelength range of roughly 625?740 Nanometer....
or white, and often also shades of that color.

In film photography, monochrome is typically the use of black and white film. Originally, all photography was done in monochrome until the invention of color film plates in the early 20th century.

In digital photography, monochrome is the capture of only shades of black by the sensor, or by post-processing a color image to present only the perceived brightness by combining the values of multiple channels (usually red, blue, and green). The weighting of individual channels may be selected to achieve a desired artistic effect - if only the red channel is selected by the weighting then the effect will be similar to that of using a red filter on panchromatic film. If the red channel is eliminated and the green and blue combined then the effect will be similar to that of Orthochromatic

Orthochromatic

Orthochromatic refers to any spectrum of light that is devoid of red light....
film or the use of a cyan filter on panchromatic film. The selection of weighting thus allows a wide range of artistic expression in the final monochromatic image.

For production of an anaglyph image

Anaglyph image

Anaglyph images are used to provide a Stereoscopy 3D effect, when viewed with 2 color glasses . Images are made up of two color layers, superimposed, but offset with respect to each other to produce a depth effect....
the original color stereogram

Stereogram

A stereogram is an optical illusion of depth created from flat, two-dimensional image or images. Originally, stereogram referred to a pair of stereo images which could be viewed using stereoscope....
source may first be reduced to monochrome in order to simplify the rendering of the image. This is sometimes required in cases where a color image would render in a confusing manner given the colors and patterns present in the source image and the selection filters used (typically red

Red

Cyan

Cyan may be used as the name of any of a number of a range of colors in the blue/green part of the spectrum. In reference to the visible spectrum cyan is used to refer to the color obtained by mixing equal amounts of green and blue light or the removal of red from white light....
),

Monochrome

Theory

Application

See also