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Glossary Design & Media

Brightness, contrast and grayscale

Brightness shifts every pixel lighter or darker, contrast spreads the light and dark values apart, and grayscale removes colour, keeping only luminance.

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In more detail

Grayscale weights the channels by how the eye sees them, roughly 0.2126 R + 0.7152 G + 0.0722 B, so green counts most. Blurring and pixelating are the opposite kind of change: they remove detail.

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See also

  • Glossary Colour contrast
    Colour contrast is the difference in luminance between text and its background; WCAG expresses it as a ratio from 1:1 to 21:1.
  • Glossary Pixelation
    Pixelation replaces blocks of pixels with a single average colour, producing a coarse mosaic effect.
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