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PGY 4440C PHOTO COMPUTER IMAGING
Picking colors is never an easy task. There is definitely an art to it. But available software tools certainly don't make it any easier. RGB, HSV, and web color palettes are based on mathematical models which have little to do with how we see colors. For example, if you look at a RGB palette you'll see large areas of very similar colors, and then in small areas big changes.
The Munsell system is different because it is based on how people perceive colors. At its core is a set of data from perceptual studies (done in the late 1930's) where people were asked to judge the differences in color pairs. The result is a data set which defines a perceptually uniform color space. (For more information on the Munsell color space, see this article on the Adobe site.)
The Munsell Palette software on this page is based on software Triplecode principal David Young encountered while a student at the MIT Media Lab. But that software was developed before the web, and was limited to use within a custom windowing system developed by fellow students, and only running on high-end workstations. The updated version here uses the same Munsell data, but can be used on any computer that supports the Flash plugin. Yay the web!
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