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Munsell System

In 1915, the American artist Albert H. Munsell published the Atlas of the Munsell Color System in which he detailed his system for specifying the color of surfaces.

The Munsell system, which attempts to represent pigment colors, has become a standard method of specifying paint pigments. The system is primarily a visual one, which  reflects the psychological aspects of color rather than the physical.


Munsell's color tree shows 20 hues, each represented by one
branch of the tree. The brightness or value of each square is
indicated by its vertical position (light at the top and dark
at the bottom) and the saturation of each hue and thus its
chroma is indicated  by how close or far
the square is from the trunk of the tree.

Gradations in saturation are presented as mixtures
of hues with their complementary colors,
based on the opposite hues in a
10 or 20-point color circle.

A 10-point circle of the
colors of the spectrum
with three non-spectral
complementary colors.

 

Munsell's 20-point circle in
which each color is opposite
to its complimentary color.