You need to realize that when you are working in a photo suite like Photoshop, with RGB values in the range [0, 255], you are actually working with sRGB color values, which are in gamma space. In linear space, neutral grey would be 0.5, and to convert that to gamma space you take 0.5^(1 / 2.2) = ~0.73 * 255 = 186. So 186…