some of my files are greyed out on my iMac , how do i access them ?

When files are grayed out, it is because you are viewing them in the file chooser of an application that cannot open those files, and it means you need a different application that is written to open them. Case in point, I can open the file chooser in Pages, and observe PDF documents are gray — because Pages cannot open them, but Preview can.

Do these files have an extension or name that you can share?

I'm having the same issue and would also love to know how to fix my gray video files!

*following*

The files that are greyed-out for me are video files on a hard drive, and were once on a MacBook Air that no longer functions. These files were backed up to the external drive. Only some are greyed-out and all are video files and one .iso disk file. They all have aberrant dates in their Get Info windows, and occupy disk space (not zero). This is under Monterey, but was also present under Big Sur and El Capitan. Is there a process to fix them? Disk First Aid and Diskwarrior do nothing to them. A detailed step-by-step process would be helpful. I've tried using Terminal but the old process described four years ago didn't seem to work.