L = R * 299/1000 + G * 587/1000 + B * 114/1000īy iterating through each pixel you can convert 24-bit to 8-bit or 3 channel to 1 channel for each pixel by using the formula above. ITU-R 601 7th Edition Construction of Luminance formula: One of the standards that can be used is Recommendation 601 from ITU-R (Radiocommunication Sector of International Telecommunication Union or ITU) organization which is also used by pillow library while converting color images to grayscale. So, how do we achieve one value from those three pixel values? We need some kind of averaging. L mode on the other hand only uses one value between 0-255 for each pixel (8-bit). In summary, color images usually use the RGB format which means every pixel is represented by a tuple of three value (red, green and blue) in Python.
There are different image hashes that can be used to transform color images to grayscale.