Experimenting with monochrome display settings is interesting and useful, both on laptop and on portable telephone.
However certain types of stuff requires colour display. Especially photographs or maps, and certain other technical charts where data is visualised using colours.
Proposed is an object tagging system, whereby every item in a computer display space has a colour display hierarchy tag. So, for example, there could be a scale from 1 to 8, and colour photographs could be tagged 1; user interface could be tagged 8, and other things could be tagged with other numbers depending on how important the colour is to their use or comprehension.
The user would then specify a colour rendering level on a sliding scale, which specified what would be rendered in colour (tags =< settings) and what would be rendered in monochrome (tags > settings). For example, Selecting 8 would display everything in full colour. Selecting 0 would display everything in monochrome. Selecting 7 would display everything in colour except for the user interface controls. Selecting 1 would display colour photographs in colour but everything else in monochrome.-- pocmloc, Jun 25 2021 Monochromatic Glasses vaguely relevant [pocmloc, Dec 19 2021] Perhaps adjusting saturation levels could provide the desired effect? (Smooth transition from unsaturated to saturated full color)-- sninctown, Jun 25 2021 This is envisaged as a binary switch between full colour and monochrome, but done on an element-by-element basis.-- pocmloc, Jun 26 2021 It can be done at the display rendering level, which is how I currently am viewing a mono laptop display and typing into a mono halfbakery and checking my mono messages on mono android. All well and good. But it would be nice if the android display rendering thingy could tell the difference between the messaging app borders and buttons and backgrounds (rendering them in mono) and the photo my mother has just sent of how well her tomatos are ripening in the greenhouse (which would be quite nice to view in full colour).-- pocmloc, Jun 26 2021 Hmmm I haven't tried that.-- pocmloc, Jun 26 2021 Right, so all you would need is a set of robot arms mounted at the edge of the monitor to move and remove the colour films as you scroll and open new windows or apps. How about implementing it in software instead...-- pocmloc, Jun 26 2021 Also, you are back to front, we are not talking about artificially saturising a monochrome image (which would involve creating new fake information) but of de-saturising selected areas of a colour image. I am not finding monochrome filter film on Amazon nor even on alibaba.-- pocmloc, Jun 26 2021 I like this - each display element would have to justify and argue for its use of colour to the OS colourfulness police-- hippo, Jun 26 2021 What's a portable telephone. Do we still have those in 2021?-- pashute, Jun 27 2021 [pashute] we need a new word. It’s like the word ‘camera’ which used to mean ‘film camera’ and then when digital cameras were introduced they were called ‘digital cameras’ to distinguish them from ‘cameras’. Now though ‘camera’ means digital cameras and we distinguish film cameras from these by explicitly referring to them as ‘film cameras’. In a similar way, ‘phone’ is changing its meaning to what we used to refer to as ‘mobile phone’ and we are starting to refer to what we used to call ‘phones’ as ‘landline phones’.-- hippo, Jun 27 2021 Do people still use cameras? I thought everyone took photos using their wireless portable telephony device handset.-- pocmloc, Jun 27 2021 That’s true, and also that’s why the term ‘cameraphone’ has been replaced by ‘phone’-- hippo, Jun 28 2021 That's some heavy vector graphic data set work, to give the taggable image areas and objects to manipulate.-- wjt, Jul 11 2021 Looking at a page which included a red-cyan anaglyph 3D colour photograph, I accidentally pressed the b/w mode button and of course the anaglyph disappeared into a fuzzy b/w image. Is it computationally possible or sensible to re-render a colour anaglyph into a red/cyan anaglyph b/w photograph?-- pocmloc, Aug 25 2021 B&W, no. But in grayscale, it might be possible to start from a neutral gray, and render the two colors in shades towards black and white.
(I don't actually know if this would work).-- MechE, Dec 20 2021 random, halfbakery