Munsell Colorspace (Colorspaces IX)

While the RGB and its transformed colorspaces are useful for computer graphics and video compression, there are other colorspaces that deal with “real life” materials, like ink and paint. Albert Henry Munsell (1858–1918), a painter, proposed such a system.

Unlike RGB and its friends, the Munsell colorspace isn’t based on mixing three primaries, but rather on hue (tint), value (brightness) and chroma (density of color, or saturation), and colors are arranged on a color wheel, but unlike the usual three/six primary color wheel, Munsell’s has 5 primary colors [1].