You want to use the mode 'L' instead of 'LA' as the parameter to the convert() method. 'LA' leaves an alpha channel and then the numpy.asarray doesn't work as you intended. If you need the alpha channel, then you will need a different method to convert to a numpy array. Otherwise, use mode 'L'.

Try it and see!

from PIL import Image 
import numpy as np

# Other answer method
im1 = Image.open('gray.png').convert('L')
im1 = np.stack((im1,)*3, axis=-1)

# Your method
im2 = Image.open('gray.png').convert('RGB')                  
im2 = np.array(im2) 

# Test if identical
print(np.array_equal(im1,im2))

Sample Output

True

I would say the one aspect that is different, is that the method in the other answer will work (insofar as it actually makes a greyscale image where R=G=B) even if the input image is colour, whereas your method will produce a colour image.

I think the answer is wrong. The Image.fromarray( ____ , 'L') function seems to only work properly with an array of integers between 0 and 255. I use the np.uint8 function for this.

You can see this demonstrated if you try to make a gradient.

import numpy as np
from PIL import Image

# gradient between 0 and 1 for 256*256
array = np.linspace(0,1,256*256)

# reshape to 2d
mat = np.reshape(array,(256,256))

# Creates PIL image
img = Image.fromarray(np.uint8(mat * 255) , 'L')
img.show()

Makes a clean gradient

vs

import numpy as np
from PIL import Image

# gradient between 0 and 1 for 256*256
array = np.linspace(0,1,256*256)

# reshape to 2d
mat = np.reshape(array,(256,256))

# Creates PIL image
img = Image.fromarray( mat , 'L')
img.show()

Has the same kind of artifacting.

Looking at the documentation on the page A crash course on NumPy for images

If you use shape,

nparray.shape

this will give the dimensions of the image as something like

(32, 32, 3)

which gives the size you found (32 x 32 x 3 = 3072)

What this shows is that your image is a 32-by-32 pixel image with three channels (red, green, and blue). If it were grayscale, the size would be 32 x 32 = 1024, corresponding to a shape of:

(32, 32)

Incidentally, to convert your image to grayscale, you would need to use something like rgb2gray (link to documentation).