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Notes on Color #5: Projecting Munsell Colors

Before the digital era, the Munsell Color System was probably the best perceptually uniform color system with hue, chroma and value components. It is also used nowadays.

The 1943 Munsell renotations (with portion cut away).
Source: Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0

When reading the introduction page of Oklab, I learned about the idea of projecting Munsell colors into diffrent color space. I find it an intuitive and fun way to study color space. Who does not like colorful demos?

Here we have to assume the quality of the Munsell data, which might not be 100% scientific. Anways I think it should be good enough, as proved by generations of aritist.

With this assmption, we may examine munsell colors in the target color space, and observe the following:

- Do the points with same chroma form a perfect circle? Are they distributed evenly?
- Do the points with same hue form a straight line? Are they distributed evenly?
- For luminance/brightness, actually I assume decient color spaces are already good enough. 

The Results

Here are projections of Munsell colors with value = 5.

My farvorites: CAM16-UCS and Oklab. 


CAM16-UCS
Oklab

Others.

Note that some models are not even designed for perception. They are simply presented here for fun.

CIELAB
CIELUV
Hunter Lab

IPT
OSA UCS

SRLab2
YCbCr
CIEXYZ
xyY


HSV
HSL

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