| 6.5. Grayscale mode | ||
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6. The “Image” Menu |  |
| 6.5. Grayscale mode | ||
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6. The “Image” Menu | |
You can use the command to convert your image to grayscale. The resulting grayscale image will have a single channel composed of various shades of gray ranging from black to white.
The number of available tonal steps between black and white depends on the image precision:
At integer precision:
An 8-bit integer grayscale image provides 255 available tonal steps from 0 (black) to 255 (white).
A 16-bit integer grayscale image provides 65535 available tonal steps from 0 (black) to 65535 (white).
A 32-bit integer grayscale image theoretically will provide 4294967295 tonal steps from 0 (black) to 4294967295 (white). But as high bit depth GIMP does all internal processing at 32-bit floating point precision, the actual number of steps will be no more than the number of tonal steps available in a 32-bit floating point image.
At floating point precision: the available number of tonal steps in a grayscale image depends on the specified bit depth (8-bit, 16-bit, or 32-bit) and the type of floating point that is requested by the program (see Floating-point arithmetic for details).
