soymint

I made this applet to visualize the Munsell color space in 3d. The cool thing about the Munsell system is that it’s modeled after human color perception. You can read more about it on wikipedia.

The vertical axis shows value (how dark or light a color is). Hues (the name of the color, eg. red, green) are laid out in a circle and chroma or saturation (how much punch a color has) gets stronger the further a color is from the center.

You can rotate the camera by moving the mouse left/right and up/down and zoom with the arrow keys.

Notice the funny shape of the color system. This is because of the way our eye perceives color. For example the most saturated blue that we can see is a dark color, while the most saturated yellow is in the light end of the spectrum.

You can also compare the gamut or range of colors of the Munsell book (subtractive mixing) to the range of a computer monitor (RGB additive mixing). Click the left mouse button to switch between the two.

This is the first time I’ve used Processing and I love it. It’s very easy to learn and extremely powerful.