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!

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).

A grey shirt is a desaturated shirt. You cannot resaturate grey.

I think if you buy a tie-dye shirt or phone case and it comes out half grey, despite it being a valid color, most folks will be disappointed.

I disagree somewhat. Color mixing just isn't particularly intuitive. It's not the most intuitive to get a third hue, but that doesn't justify grey (which has an undefined hue). I do think most people are quite comfortable with the fact that between blue and yellow exists green, but is it a saturated green or a desaturated green? Additive and subtractive color mixing behave very differently here.

It's funny and a bit sad because we just went througha decades-long effort to migrate away from jet/rainbow gradients to vik/batlow/bi-hue gradients, and now rainbow is forcing its way back.

https://theconversation.com/how-rainbow-colour-maps-can-dist...

https://www.poynter.org/archive/2013/why-rainbow-colors-aren...

Honestly I suspect this is largely a non issue. I have never made a gradient that goes through more than 2 different color (by some vague measure of different) without adding an additional stop. If I wanted to go through yellow and green to get to blue, I would add a stop at yellow and another at green, and I suspect most developers would do the same.

There's no transition, this is color mixing, or overlay in case of light.