It is a distant relative of the Munsell color system, invented by Edwin Munsell. He painstakingly assembled it from showing human subjects pairs of identical colors, then gradually increasing their difference until they were perceived as difference. The so-called ‘barely perceptual difference’ approach. Color, when mapped in this manner, is an extremely un-even blob, not the neat globe people had assumed it to be.
HSV was invented by the graphics industry as an artist-friendly space. I sometimes use HSV in my teaching. It is useful for design students to see an image broken down in this way. My copy of Photoshop version 1 could actually work in HSV space. But it was soon discovered that though it is easy to navigate as a space, it is lousy for color adjustments of any kind.
> The so-called ‘barely perceptual difference’ approach. Color, when mapped in this manner, is an extremely un-even blob, not the neat globe people had assumed it to be.
Has this been tried when presenting the colours randomly rather than continuously increasing in distance? I'm curious if the result would be different. Eyes (and visual processing in general) seems to be edited based on our own expectations and other factors.
The original test was pre-digital. It also served a different purpose: to map a color space (the preceding one serves to test our color vision). I belive that the key starting colors were presented in randon order, and in a very controlled enviroment. The test starts with two identical swatches. A tiny difference is then introduced by swopping one swatch for another. This may be a difference of hue or lightness. As the original color swatches were made with paint, saturation would have been difficult to adjust.
The importance of colour to so many industries meant that this experiment waas repeated multiple times over the last 100 years. It is now a very well plotted domian indeed.
You are right about color perception being multi-factorial. Hell yes. For example, beliove it or not, culture can affects the hues that we percieve, and gender can affect how intensly we see them. But Muncell's original experaimnt was very focused on providing one thing, and over the years it has proven itself many times.
An yes I have read before about the whole green/blue being the same thing in some cultures and women often seeing more colours than men. So colour seems to have a very subjective foundation, and I was curious how the science approaches that.
What GP is referring to is just noticeable difference (JND) which is a common technique used in sensory & perception studies and has solid foundations.
HSV was invented by the graphics industry as an artist-friendly space. I sometimes use HSV in my teaching. It is useful for design students to see an image broken down in this way. My copy of Photoshop version 1 could actually work in HSV space. But it was soon discovered that though it is easy to navigate as a space, it is lousy for color adjustments of any kind.