page_title: Albert Henry Munsell
section_title: Munsell color order system
hierarchical_section_title: Albert Henry Munsell / Munsell color order system
context_page_description: Albert Henry Munsell was an American painter, teacher of art, and the inventor of the Munsell color system.
  He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, attended and served on the faculty of Massachusetts Normal Art School, and died in nearby Brookline.
  As a painter, he was noted for seascapes and portraits.
  Munsell is famous for inventing the Munsell color system, an early attempt at creating an accurate system for numerically describing colors. He wrote three books about it: A Color Notation, Atlas of the Munsell Color System and one published posthumously, A Grammar of Color: Arrangements of Strathmore Papers in a Variety of Printed Color Combinations According to The Munsell Color System. The Munsell color order system has gained international acceptance and has served as the foundation for many color order systems, including CIELAB. In 1917, he founded the Munsell Color Company.
context_section_description: To help display and organize his color theory, Munsell created the Munsell color system. It is set up to organize each color by the color's hue, value, and chroma. Each dimension of a color can be changed independently of the other dimensions. This helped Munsell organize the colors in a three-dimensional space, known as the Munsell Color Space. To create this space, Munsell first took the neutral colors, and aligned them vertically, with black on the bottom and white on the top. In between, the neutral greys were spaced out in equal visual intervals. So, as one moves up in the space, the value of each row increases. Next, Munsell organized the chroma as increasing away from the center. So as one gets farther away from the center, the chroma increases. The hue is positioned at different angles protruding away from the center neutral colors. The distance between each color was visually uniform, because the system was derived from vigorous testing of the human visual response to color. This arrangement turned out to be known as the Munsell color tree.
  By organizing the Munsell color system in this way, the Munsell tree has many advantages. One advantage is that the system is designed for new colors to be added. If the spacing between two colors is too large, an intermediate color can be placed in between those two colors. What is important is that adding new colors this way will not disturb the order of the other colors. In other words, the other colors' dimension values will not change. Another advantage of this system is that it made it very easy to communicate color. Each color is given its own values, which can be thought of as coordinates in the space. Therefore, to communicate color, the coordinates of the color can stated, and the exact color will be known. So, the Munsell color system created a standard system of color specification. It also proved to be the groundwork for many other color spaces, such as CIELab. This is because Munsell did much of the pioneering work in Color Science, and other systems expanded on what he already discovered.
  However, there are some limitations to the Munsell color system. While it is handy to have a system with visual uniformly spaced colors, the space is not continuous, meaning that it has a discrete number of samples. Also, the spacing between the colors are very large, and because of this it is difficult to measure thresholds using the system, such as the just noticeable difference. These limitations inspired the CIE to develop a uniform, continuous color space for characterizing color differences. This turned out to be the CIELab color space, which was heavily influenced by the Munsell color system.
  A few changes were made to the System since it was first developed. in 1943, the OSA recommended a change in the notation of the system, and these changes became known as the Munsell re-notations. In 1950, the number of hues in the Munsell Book of Color doubled from 20 to 40. Then in 1958, a glossy version of the Book of Color was produced in addition to the matte version already in print.
caption: This image shows the Munsell Color space and the orientation of the hue, value, and chroma dimensions.