OpenStreetMap Grayscale tiles? - openstreetmap

Question

I'm building up experience with web development and my next projects are some web maps. I've looked into Google Maps and Open Street Maps and would like to use OSM for a project as it contains more detailed information of building footprints.
I've tried styling Google Maps which seemed fairly straightforward, but I'm a little lost with OSM. I've got to the point of trying to create my own renders (with TileMill) but this is crashing my system due to the amount of data.
What I essentially need is this (but for the UK);
http://maps.stamen.com/#terrain/12/37.7706/-122.3782
Are there any resources which you can recommend or how easy/ difficult is this to create myself? I think I would need to create the map (with TileMill or similar and then find my own servers to host), or is there an easy way to convert the standard map to Grayscale?
I want to keep it as simple as possible so please any recommendations?

Answer 1

Turning the standard map to grayscale: I might be very late to this but for anyone else running into this question: I found a very easy solution if you're working with HTML and Javascript using OpenLayers and the standard OpenStreetMap-Tile-Layer in color. I took the solution from here: https://openlayers.org/en/latest/examples/semi-transparent-layer.html
I don't know much about web development but this solution worked for me. Upon creating the map, as done in main.js in the example from the link, a class name is defined ('bw')
className: 'bw',
that can be used in index.html to manipulate the style o f it in the part:
<style>
.bw {
filter: grayscale(100%);
}
</style>
My application was altering a pre-built web-map from the qgis2web extension for QGIS. I was able to turn the tile layers from the background map to grayscale so the results would stand out more.

Answer 2

You could use https://github.com/Zverik/leaflet-grayscale to display any tile layer in grayscale. It's a plugin built upon the leaflet map displaying library.