### 6.5. Grayscale mode

You can use the Grayscale 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).

#### 6.5.1. Activating the Command

You can access this command from the main menu through Image → Mode → Grayscale.

6.4. RGB mode |  | 6.6. Indexed mode

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