middle gray

50% CIELAB lightness
( Y = %)

In photography, painting, and other visual arts, middle gray or middle grey is a tone that is perceptually about halfway between black and white on a lightness scale; in photography and printing, it is typically defined as 18% reflectance in visible light.

Light meters, cameras and pictures are often calibrated using an 18% gray card''Film and Its Techniques'' by Raymond Spottiswoode or a color reference card such as a ColorChecker. On the assumption that 18% is similar to the average reflectance of a scene, a grey card can be used to estimate the required exposure of film.

History

Following the Weber–Fechner law, at the start of the 20th century human lightness perception was assumed to be logarithmic. In 1903, ''The New International Encyclopædia'' illustrated this concept by stating that given a black and a white with a luminance ratio of 1 : 60 (　 : 　) the geometric mean had to be used to find the middle gray. That is equivalent to a relative luminance of 12.9% (　).

When Munsell was developing his colour system, he tried to ascertain the relation between luminance and perceived lightness. As early as 1906, he wrote: 'Should we use logarithmic curve or curve of squares?' In 1920 Priest, Gibson and McNicholas showed using both a König-Martens spectrophotometer and an apparatus designed by Gibson where the outputs of two photocells are balanced that the shades in Munsell's 1915 atlas followed a square root curve, which was later confirmed by extensive experiments. In Munsell's system, the shades of neutral gray were labelled N¹ to N⁹, with N⁵ in the middle and 0 and 10 denoting the unachievable ideal black and perfect white.

In 1933, Alexander Ector Orr Munsell (Albert Henry Munsell's son) found "that a series of neutral reflecting surfaces whose reflectances are ..., 18.0, ..., and 100.0 percent, ..., form for the average observer a series of equal differences in value."

From the 1930s onward various lightness curves were proposed, but halfway the 20th century the proposals settled on cube-root based curves. In 1976 the International Commission on Illumination defined the CIELAB color space, an extension of which would become the standard for the coming decades in a variety of applications.Kenichiro Masaoka, Fu Jiang, Mark D. Fairchild & Rodney L. Heckaman, ''Analysis of color volume of multi-chromatic displays using gamut rings'' Following research in the 80s, in the 90s more and more advanced models of colour vision were developed, the first major step being CIECAM97s; see Lightness § 1933 for details.

Table of middle grays

Below are various "middle" grays as based on various criteria.

The shades in the rightmost column will only be correct if viewed on a calibrated monitor; you can check if the 50% luminance level of your monitor is correc
here

Note that LCD screens, even when correctly calibrated, often have a brightness that varies considerably depending on the viewing angle. When using the luminance level checker above, try stepping back and changing your position until the hatched rectangle in the center of the gray field appears to dissolve into the background.

If the hatched rectangle does not appear to be of the same brightness, then the "middle grays" rendered in the table are not correctly displayed on your screen.

Quarter luminance list (typical monitor calibrated to 2.2 gamma, 50% luminance gray has RGB hex 0xBA value, which is 0.5^(1/2.2)*255)

* Context-dependent; an estimate is displayed here taking the environment where it appears
in the article into account and assuming a neutrally lit surround of 200 cd/m².

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Middle Gray
Science of photography