The Munsell system: explained simply

The Munsell system is an ordered collection of painted colour samples in which every step is meant to look the same size. Albert Munsell, an American painter and art teacher, devised it in the early 1900s. It describes each colour by three qualities: hue, value, which is lightness, and chroma, which is strength. It was the first widely used system to be tested against what people actually see.

5R 4/14 (approx.)#C4142F5R 8/4 (approx.)#E9BDBA10YR 5/4 (approx.)#93774F5G 5/8 (approx.)#2D8B63N 5/ (grey)#7B7B7B

It's unclear who took this photograph, but it is the photograph of Munsell included in A Color Notation , his 1905 book, and is therefore now out of copyright. The image was restored by Munsell Color Science Laboratory g — Photo: Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Munsell's idea

Munsell wanted a way to teach colour to children as exactly as music is taught with notes. He set out his system in A Color Notation in 1905 and published an atlas of samples in 1915. He arranged hues in a circle around a vertical axis of greys, with chroma increasing outwards. He did not force the result into a neat sphere. Yellow reaches its strongest when light and purple when dark, and some hues can be made far more intense than others, so the Munsell solid is lopsided, like an irregular tree.

The notation

A Munsell colour is written as hue, then value over chroma. There are five main hues, red, yellow, green, blue and purple, and five in between, each divided into ten steps. Value runs from 0 for black to 10 for white. Chroma starts at 0 for grey and has no fixed upper limit. So 5R 4/14 is a middle red, fairly dark and very strong, while 5R 8/4 is a pale pink. In the 1940s the Optical Society of America adjusted the samples after large-scale viewing tests, and those renotations are the modern standard.

Where it is used

Soil scientists the world over describe soil by holding a sample beside the Munsell soil charts: a typical entry reads 10YR 5/4, a yellowish brown. Archaeologists record pottery and sediment the same way, and geologists use rock colour charts built on it. It has been used to set standards for the colour of foods, of electrical wire and of skin and hair in forensic work. Later systems, CIE Lab among them, were checked against Munsell's samples, and its three terms remain the standard vocabulary for describing colour.

Sources and further reading

About this page

Original text by the Rang desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Meanings of colour vary from place to place and person to person. If we have something wrong, tell us.