Tone reproduction is like coloring a picture. You know how sometimes you might use crayons to color a picture and some parts are really dark and some parts are really light?
Well, tone reproduction is kind of like that. Except instead of coloring a picture, we're talking about making a picture look like real life.
In real life, things are never just one color. They have shadows and highlights and all sorts of different shades in between. So if we want a picture to look like real life, we need to make sure it has all those different shades too.
This is where tone reproduction comes in. Tone reproduction is like giving the picture different shades in all the right places so it looks like what we see in real life.
It's kind of like when you use different crayons to color different parts of a picture. You might use a dark blue crayon to color in the shadows and a light blue crayon to color in the highlights. And then you use different shades of blue in between so it all looks really beautiful and realistic.
Tone reproduction is a grown-up way of doing that, except instead of crayons, we use really fancy computer programs to add shades and colors to pictures. All those different shades and colors help make a picture look like it was taken in the real world, even if it was just a drawing or a picture on a phone.