Color Wheel

Below is a photograph of a color wheel marketed by The Color Wheel Company, Philomath, Oregon, www.colorwheelco.com . It is a useful tool for paint and pigment mixing. It includes features from both the Munsell and Ostwald color systems and uses the color characteristics hue, saturation and brightness. It also has some of the characteristics of the Newton Color Circle.

Below is a picture of the opposite side of the wheel. It gives further guidance about strategies for mixing paint colors.

The MUNSELL system is a collection of color samples for comparison, with adjacent samples based upon equal perceived differences in color.

The Ostwald and Munsell color systems match colors to a set of standard samples. The Ostwald system creates a color space based on dominant wavelength, purity, and luminance, mapping the values of hue, saturation and brightness. Establishing the values for these parameters is done with a disc colorimeter whch mixes on a disk amounts of the pure spectral color at the dominant wavelength with white, and black . Thus the point in the Ostwald color space is represented by values C,W, abd B to represent the percentages of the circle. For example 35,15,50 represents 35% full color, 15% white, and 50% black.

The OSTWALD system is based upon an analysis of reflectance curves.

Comparison of Munsell & Ostwald