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].

Bad Laptop Colors: Why?

In Calibrating your LCD for Better Results I presented a few techniques to adjust your LCD so that you get better colors, even though it’s not a perfect calibration.

I have a couple of laptops and their screens aren’t all equal. Not all all. The Vaio gives beautiful, vibrant colors. The Dell Mini 10 HD also gives rather cromulent colors. The E6500, on the other hand, is dreadful. Not the whole computer of course, because otherwise it’s a rather good machine. But the screen is just disappointing. And the thing is, you can’t adjust anything besides the brightness—which defaults to blinding bright. What would it take to make such a screen acceptable?

What’s a Good Color Scheme?

Although EMACS is growing old, filled with passé idiosyncrasies, and rather complicated to tweak, I grew accustomed to it and is now my main editor. I use it for shell scripting, C++, HTML, even. But to use EMACS properly, or a least make it enjoyable a little bit, one must do a fair bit of configuration. Key bindings to match modern keyboards, adding the macros you’re using the most, and, finally, adjusting the color scheme so that your eyes do not bleed after a few hours of work.

But what is a good color scheme?