2006.12.05 15:52 "[Tiff] Grayscale, or is it?", by Joris Van Damme

2006.12.06 04:45 "Re: [Tiff] Re: Tiff Digest, Vol 31, Issue 3", by Edward Lam

The standard conversion from RGB to gray, documented in the textbooks, is grey level = .33R+.5G+.17B. So a unitary conversion back to RGB is fine.

And of course this equation is acknowledged to be wrong - you can't combine gamma encoded values like this to give a correct greyscale.

Charles Poynton has a nice note explaining this:

http://poynton.com/papers/YUV_and_luminance_harmful.html

Found from the the wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luma_%28video%29

-Edward