Why called Black and White

If you're (fully) colorblind, you see the world in monochrome (without color).

While B&W (film) still see's color and creates a B&W space with it.

kxl said:
Not the absence of color, but rather having one color:

Mono = single/one; Chromatic = perceived color with saturation value greater than zero
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Sorry to be too argumentative, but "monochrome" does not mean "without color". It means "one color". Black regions of a monochrome image simply mean that the intensity (brightness? value?) of that one color is zero there.

I was taught (back in the stone age) that black was "the absence of all color" but I think that is incorrect. I think that black is simply the absence of light, so "black" can be any color. Theoretically. For example - turn the lights out in the room. Everything goes black - red stuf, blue stuff, green stuff - all black.

My head hurts now.
 
filmtwit said:
If you're (fully) colorblind, you see the world in monochrome (without color).

While B&W (film) still see's color and creates a B&W space with it.
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Semantics, but as you said, "B&W still sees color..." so it CANNOT be "the absence of." If it were the absence of, then we would call it Nihilchromatic or Absentiachromatic; instead, we call it "MONO" meaning single or one.

daveleo said:
Sorry to be too argumentative, but "monochrome" does not mean "without color". It means "one color". Black regions of a monochrome image simply mean that the intensity (brightness? value?) of that one color is zero there.

I was taught (back in the stone age) that black was "the absence of all color" but I think that is incorrect. I think that black is simply the absence of light, so "black" can be any color. Theoretically. For example - turn the lights out in the room. Everything goes black - red stuf, blue stuff, green stuff - all black.

My head hurts now.
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EXACTLY!
 
Hmmm, I thought all cats are grey at night...

Regards, David


PS OTOH, it does support Wittgenstein's view in Tractatus about metaphysics.
 
Thanks all for the interesting discussion. The gist I get from the conversations is that it's terminology issue. But the main reason behind asking the question is to get some historical context which some of you have addressed.

Long live B&W, now let's go out and shoot!
 
Dave, thanks for this example, you give me an idea for image treatment to try. Cheers.

daveleo said:
Yeh, it's just accepted nomenclature that is too old to change.

Technically, you are right: "B&W" = 0,255 but "grayscale" = 0-255. There really is a world of difference between the two concepts, if taken literally.
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grayscale.jpg

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blackwhite.jpg
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"Monochrome" translates as one-colour so it's not correct, maybe a better term would be panchromatic. That translates as "across colours", i.e. without (visible) colour discrimination. Largely nit-picking over the semantics of language, nevertheless and historically it has long been called "black and white".

Maybe it's just another example of the evolution of technical terms. It's not that long ago that computer was an occupation (of someone who did mathematical calculations, manually) rather than an object.
 
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