Albert H. Munsell

A fasinating fellow, the creator of what was previously, and very briefly mentioned in the last blogpost, the Munsell color system.

How we're going to go about this in attempts to easily understand The Munsell color system is by breaking it down in a few bullet points and steps and a few pictures.

1.Understanding the 3 dimensions
The Munsell color system breaks color downbased on three dimensions:hue, value(lightness) and chroma (color purity) Hue?
Hue is the color such as red, green, blue, etc. In the Munsell system these are given letter codes, i.e. Red (R), Yellow-Red (YR), Green (G), Green-Yellow (GY) and so on.
Value?
is how light or dark a color is. In the Munsell system, value is indicated with a number, i.e. 2, 4, 6 and so on.
Chroma?
Chroma is how weak or strong a color. In the Munsell system, chroma is indicated with a number, typically in the range of 2-14 (upwards of 30 for colors in the fluorescent family). The chroma scale runs horizontally and moves from weak (from the left) to strong (to the right), in ascending order.

2. Reading Color Notations
Each color is designated with what is referred to as a color notation; for example, 2.5G 9/6. As explained above, each of these indicators refer to the 3 attributes of color. 2.5G is the Hue (or color), 5 is the Value (or lightness/darkness) and 30 is the Chroma (weak/strong)

We reccomend if you're interested to play around with different values by using  this website

http://pteromys.melonisland.net/munsell/

The color from the code we used an example was this :
That is basically it!
Two main things to understand,
know what each dimension is, then secondly, how to read the codes. Here we have a more aesthetically pleasing 3D model showing all the colors in the model lined up.

Till next time!

Roro