The Muser

Physics & Physiology of Color

All the material located at this web page address is
© J. C. Adamson, 2020 and prior years,
unless otherwise noted.

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Hue, Saturation & Value
Additive Mixture The Characteristics of Color
Subtractive
Mixture
Complementary
Colors Color is complex Hue:
Primary Colors
Hue, Saturation, We usually refer to colors by
Value simple names such as red or
Predicting Color blue. But of course, not all
Mixtures reds or blues look alike. Some
Color Sandbox are lighter or darker. Some
Mind-Blower seem richer, or more color-full.
Young's 3-color Some blues look a little
Theory greenish or purplish. So we
A 3-color System invent other color names like
Land's 2-color mauve, chartreuse or burnt
System
sienna, to make further
James Clerk
Maxwell distinctions between colors.
Thomas Young Are there more precise and
Hermann von descriptive ways to talk about This color wheel shows the six major
Helmholtz hues. There is an infinite number of
colors? Indeed, there are hues between these colors.
Edwin H. Land many workable methods of
The Muser's color classification. What all Hue is the most obvious
Pages these methods share though, characteristic of a color. There
is that they recognize three is really an infinite number of
Home characteristics of color. possible hues. A full range of
hues exists, for example,
3rd Party A minimum of three
between red and yellow. In the
descriptors are always
National Debt middle of that range are all the
required to classify a color.
orange hues. Similarly, there
Color For example, we can create a
is a range of hues between
color from three primary
Cinema any other two hues. This color
colors, and simply describe
wheel shows each of its six
Denver the amounts of each of the
colors with medium value, and
History three primaries used. That is
high saturation.
Vignettes
the basis of describing color
for web pages, and for the Saturation:
Great Reality C.I.E. Chromaticity system (also called chroma)
The Blog used by physicists and color
technicians worldwide.
On Musing But there are more
Archived descriptive, if less precise,
Musing classification methods that
correspond more closely to
Muser's Bio how we perceive color. One
such system was developed These scales show red, magenta and
blue hues in a range of saturations, all
Email Muser by A. H. Munsell between with medium value.
1905 and 1929. He described
colors in terms of hue, value, Saturation is the purity of a
and chroma. color. High saturation colors
look rich and full. Low
Munsell classified colors into
saturation colors look dull and
five major hues; today we use
grayish.
six for most purposes. The
characteristic he called Value:
chroma is approximately what (also called brightness or
we call saturation today. luminosity)
Munsell's system wasn't
mathematically based, and
failed to account for some
important phenomena of color
vision, but was foundational
for the hue-saturation-value
system (HSV or HSB) in
common usage today.
Any color can be described in
terms of its hue, value and
saturation. A dark brown color
for example, would have a
hue in the yellow-red region of
the color wheel. It would have
a low value (because it's
dark). And it would have a low
saturation. A light brown color
would differ from the dark
brown only in its value.
Experiment in the
Sandbox
Click here to play in the Color
Sandbox, with hue, saturation
and value.
These scales shows low saturation
red, magenta and blue, in a range of
values.
Value is the lightness or
darkness of a color. Light
colors are sometimes called
tints, and dark colors shades.
All high saturation colors have
medium values (because light
and dark colors are achieved
by mixing with white or black).
Please note: The terms chroma and
saturation, and the terms value,
brightness and luminosity are not
exactly synonymous. All of them have
precise definitions, and each is used
for specific purposes in technical
applications. The differences are
probably not important to a basic
understanding of color characteristics.
In common usage for computer and
design purposes they are often
interchanged and used imprecisely
and incorrectly.
© J. C. Adamson, 1997, 2012