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.
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.
Aren't these in direct conflict? If you can't resaturate it, that implies it's not desaturated.
> 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.
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.
