Home / Image tools / grayscale
Tone
Black and white, sepia and invert
Three tonal conversions with a strength dial, which matters more than it sounds: partial desaturation is usually more useful than the full effect.
Preview
Grayscale is not one thing
Averaging red, green and blue gives a technically grey image and a visually wrong one, because the eye is far more sensitive to green than to blue. This tool uses the standard luminance weighting, roughly 21% red, 72% green and 7% blue, which is what film and every serious image editor approximate. Skies stay dark, foliage stays bright, faces keep their modelling.
The strength dial blends between the original and the effect. At 60% you get a muted, partly desaturated look that is often more attractive than full black and white, and it is useful for background images that must not compete with text over them.
A note on file size
A grayscale JPEG is not automatically smaller. The colour channels are still stored unless the encoder chooses otherwise, and a browser canvas always writes full colour. If you need a genuinely smaller file, compress it afterwards with one of the size tools.
Common questions
Why does my black and white photo look flat?
Because colour was doing the work of separating the subject from the background. Once it is gone you often need more contrast. Convert here, then adjust contrast in a photo editor.
Is inverting the same as a film negative?
Close but not identical. Inverting flips each channel numerically. A real negative also has an orange mask and a different tonal curve, so scanned film needs more than this.
Other image tools