The effect of hue on the perception of blackness using munsell samples

Abstract

Although black is an important color, the perception of black objects has not been systematically examined. The purpose of this work was to determine the influence of hue on the perception of preferred blackness. A set of 20 glossy low chroma Munsell sheets were purchased comprising a complete hue circle with a value and chroma of two and one, respectively (L* = 19.3–20.75, and C* = 3.66–6.58). The Munsell samples were divided into two interleaved groups: (5R, 5YR, 5Y, 5GY, 5G, 5BG, 5B, 5PB, 5P, and 5RP) and (10R, 10YR, 10Y, 10GY, 10G, 10BG, 10B, 10PB, 10P, and 10RP). Fifty color‐normal observers force‐ranked the two sets of 10 samples from “most like black” to “least like black.” Observers then assessed a set of six samples that represented the three samples from each set of 10 that the observer chose to be “most like black.” The 50 observers were found to have fairly good autoconcordance and concordance values. In repeat experiments observers agreed with themselves in 81% of the pairwise decisions, and they agreed with the grand mean rank 76% of the time. The blue–green samples (with Munsell hue notations 10G, 5BG, and 10BG) were most selected (and were considered blackest), followed by green, blue, and purple–blue. The samples selected the fewest times by any observer as being most black were the red samples. The grand mean rankings demonstrate that greenish to bluish blacks are perceived by the observers as “blacker” than yellowish and reddish blacks. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 38, 423–428, 2013