Term for converting to black&white
Is there a single word to denote reducing the color palette of an image to two colors: black and white? For instance, navy becomes black and beige turns into white.
I know there is desaturate, but it's too broad, can mean even a slight reduction in color.
The proper term for converting an image to black and white is binarize. The process of doing so is called binarization.
From Wiktionary:
binarize (third-person singular simple present binarizes, present participle binarizing, simple past and past participle binarized)
- (mathematics) To represent in binary
- To convert (an image) to only black and white.
An example usage would be: "The first step is to binarize the image by applying a threshold."
This question might be better asked at GD.SE but there is posterize:
posterize verb
[with object]
print or display (a photograph or other image) using only a small number of different tones:
posterize the image and view the result[ODO]
The term is derived from letterpress printing of posters, where only a limited number of solid colours were easily used.
Original and posterized images (using Paint Shop Pro's posterize function):
I agree with most of the suggestions above and will offer a few more:
- Adopt the terminology "convert [source] to destination," as insisting on making everything a verb just makes most of the verbs very clumsy
- threshold could be a synonym for posterizing to monochrome
-
halftone to 1-bit monochrome would cover another example of output in only one colorant (trading off spatial resolution for pixel depth)
- but then you may want to state what kind of halftone (clustered dot screens with frequency and angle, or stochastic screens, or hybrids)