6 ms·

Online Color Challenge

44 points by ibrad 12y ago

monitron 12y ago
This thing again! I'm red-green colorblind, and got a 90. Ouch. It looked pretty good to me!
OneOneOneOne 12y ago
Is using an LCD monitor "cheating?" I got a perfect score but am neither artistic nor fashionable.
- TrainedMonkey 12y ago
  I tried on two different LCD's and got wildly different scores. On big expensive HP IPS my score was way better compared to T530 LCD.
- georgemcbay 12y ago
  There are lots of different kinds of LCD monitors. Using a TN LCD panel with an effective 6 bits per color channel and a compressed dynamic range would be the opposite of cheating, it would be playing with two hands tied behind your back, so to speak. Using a wide-gamut IPS panel that is properly calibrated would be more like "cheating" (though not actually cheating if your own color perception is really what you want to test, as in that case the monitor should reproduce color as accurately as possible).
mjs7231 12y ago
Perfect score! Test takes a bit of time, I got bored about half way through. I wonder how I would do on not a nice a monitor.
- NaNaN 12y ago
  Want more challenges? Try this: http://color.method.ac http://color.method.ac
  - brute 12y ago
    Or try blendoku: http://www.blendoku.com/ http://www.blendoku.com/
lgmspb 12y ago
It gets trickier around 0.25 and 0.75, i wonder why?
- smoyer 12y ago
  Very true ... I got a patch of four incorrect on each of the four strips (for a score of 16) and they were all straddling either the 0.25 or 0.75 marks.
poopchute 12y ago
I already know that I'm colourblind, but if anyone else is curious what those results would look like; Here ya go: http://imgur.com/a/OgnuM http://imgur.com/a/OgnuM Something of interest that I noticed is the fairly constant gap between areas of low colour acuity
- egeozcan 12y ago
  I didn't concentrate too much but still wonder if my score of 49 is something I should be worried about? http://i.imgur.com/WqRonYi.png http://i.imgur.com/WqRonYi.png
  - stan_rogers 12y ago
    Why worry about something you can't fix? (Unless, of course, your monitor, not your vision, is the problem.) Unless you "do colour" for a living and have wondered why clients aren't banging down your door, it's probably not a real-world problem for you. (If it was a problem severe enough to be a safety hazard or mangle your fashion sense to the point that a hypothetical Garanimals For Grownups might be helpful, you would probably be acutely aware of it by now.) Hell, there's even at least one "name" professional photographer (Joel Grimes) who would score worse than you did. (Your problem is relatively subtle, apart from a bit of a mess in the red/yellow/green transition. You would probably have some real difficulty distinguishing the yellows of an egg yolk, a buttercup and a lemon, or at least being able to spot them in isolation. As handicaps go, I've seen worse.)
    - egeozcan 12y ago
      Well, I also do front-end web development from time to time and when I do, maybe I should consider having much more external advice on design matters than before. I never thought I had any problems, that's what worried me. Thank you very much for the explanation.
  - incision 12y ago
    I wouldn't put too much weight on it... I tried it without much effort on my so-so Dell desktop display and got 59. Tried again on my RMBP with even less effort and got 14. However, I did have trouble in the same places both times so it's certainly demonstrating something. Dell: http://imgur.com/MFvcSky http://imgur.com/MFvcSky RMBP: http://imgur.com/61WlVQS http://imgur.com/61WlVQS
antipod 12y ago
I got a perfect score (zero). The trick is to blur your vision.
- throwwit 12y ago
  ...or tilt an lcd screen.
morl0ck 12y ago
Perfect ColorIQ http://grab.by/xGhe http://grab.by/xGhe
MisterBastahrd 12y ago
I remember this test! I outscored the entire art department at my workplace, with an uncalibrated monitor to boot. The worst scorer? The art director. He clocked in with a score of 37. Luckily, his job has a lot more to do with layout than color precision.
joshvm 12y ago
Perfect colour vision, actually quite surprised at that - some of the shades in the middle were very hard to distinguish. Performed on a 5 year old Macbook - assuming my Dell IPS panel make it easier.
- fatbat 12y ago
  Surprised I got a 0 as well! At some point I was not sure if my monitor color collaboration was off or I am seeing patterns.
kefka 12y ago
Hmm. I got 8 http://imgur.com/R4LkI3s http://imgur.com/R4LkI3s
adestefan 12y ago
Missed 4 in a row right in the green section.
lisch 12y ago
I love stuff like this. Reminds you that what you believe is "true" is rarely what other people may believe.
spacefight 12y ago
It's still beyond my understanding, on how Pantone could copyright their colorsets...
menacestudio 12y ago
Got a 6.
morbius 12y ago
I got a 4. Pretty terrible result for somebody as young as I am, but I suppose myopia and the the spectral aberration caused by eyeglasses makes it harder to distinguish colors. http://i.imgur.com/uLRW0YI.png http://i.imgur.com/uLRW0YI.png
- josephschmoe 12y ago
  I had a similar problem with a couple of them. They felt completely indistinguishable to me. Got a 3. A part of it is the fact this is on a computer monitor though. If you only got a few wrong, it's probably not a big deal.
  - PhasmaFelis 12y ago
    Huh. So most of them were distinguishable to you? Interesting. I could tell a properly-placed color apart from the colors two or three spaces away from it, but not usually from its immediate neighbors. My main strategy was to assume that, if a color looked identical to each of its neighbors, it was in the right place. I got a 16, which seems decent enough.
PhasmaFelis 12y ago
The scoring is weird. It places your final result on a scale from 0 to 99, but just hitting Submit without changing anything produces a score in the 800-1100 range, and my "Highest score for your gender and age range" is 1520. Why doesn't the scale reflect actual values? How could someone score substantially worse than random? ...I think something is wrong with their best/worst scores, actually. About 80% of the age/gender brackets say the best is 0 and the worst is 1520, and that consistency is weird to begin with, but some have really dramatic outliers. Women aged 50-59 range from negative 162 to 410,378,090!
aaroninsf 12y ago
Is it just me, or is this for many people more a test of a) your capacity to stare at a screen without tearing up, blurring, etc. and b) the quality and color profile both native and gamut-corrected etc. of your monitor? I swear this is much more a test of my current monitor settings vs. ambient light conditions, than anything serious about my own color perception. A physical version with color chips and the option to work under a variety of lights (LED, halogen, CF, incandescent, sunlight...) at whim would be way more revealing. But yeah, harder to code in JS.
nardi 12y ago
I really hate how they show lowest and highest scores, and no median/mean/percentiles, or anything at all that would help you decide whether your score was good or bad.
- cessor 12y ago
  I noticed this as well, just giving the range is not really helpful. Also the scale is strange, 0 being the best. I was confused when I scored a 4...
cessor 12y ago
I liked this test. I am running a calibrated display, so I am assuming the display is not a factor. Remember to relax your eyes frequently, starring at a color for too long tires the cone cells and might affect your test results as a fatigue effect.
zacinbusiness 12y ago
I scored a 12 on an uncalibrated laptop display (late 2010 MacBook Air) so I don't think that's too poor for my age range (29). Still, I would have liked to see some median scores. My results: http://screencast.com/t/s5ohpINp http://screencast.com/t/s5ohpINp Also, by the end of the process I felt like I was going to be sick, not sure if it was the brightness (my eyes are extremely sensitive to light and I normally keep the brightness at 1 bar but I had it at full brightness for this).
- hamburglar 12y ago
  I don't think the calibration of your monitor has much to do with it, since the task is to sort colors relative to each other, not absolutely. In fact, after writing that first sentence, I tweaked the heck out of my monitor color settings (the r/g/b adjustments go from 0 to 100 with defaults at 50 and I increased my red to 73 and decreased my green to 37 -- it looked like hell) and was still able to score 16.
  - zacinbusiness 12y ago
    Interesting! I would have thought the color "trueness" would have a lot more of an effect. But I guess the originator of the test took that into account.
Cerium 12y ago
I have taken this test several times over the years. I can score perfectly but if I make a mistake it is in the blue greens. I have fun running different sorting algorithms on the tiles. The trick to getting a perfect score is doing a pass where you switch every pair of adjacent tiles. This will double the color delta on the edges if the tile is correct and halve the delta if the position was wrong. I always catch at least a blue or two on this pass.
agf 12y ago
Interesting test. I got a 4, much better than I expected, on my RMBP. Anyone else here take the XKCD color survey back in 2010: http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ I was presented with an awful lot of colors I didn't have a better word for than "tan", "beige", "green", etc, so I expected that my "color acuity score" would be poor. Looks like I was having trouble without something to compare to, and having trouble naming, rather than having trouble identifying differences between shares. Good to know!
otoburb 12y ago
91. Still not sure whether that's good or bad given my age range. EDIT: Based on a brain damage study with 48 patients and 48 healthy controls "a total error score between 20 and 100 was taken as the range of normal competence for discrimination."[1] [1] http://www.perceptionweb.com/abstract.cgi?id=v990416 http://www.perceptionweb.com/abstract.cgi?id=v990416, "Scoring efficiency on the Farnsworth - Munsell 100-Hue test after brain damage"

44 points by ibrad 12y ago

monitron 12y ago

This thing again! I'm red-green colorblind, and got a 90. Ouch. It looked pretty good to me!

OneOneOneOne 12y ago

Is using an LCD monitor "cheating?" I got a perfect score but am neither artistic nor fashionable.

TrainedMonkey 12y ago
I tried on two different LCD's and got wildly different scores. On big expensive HP IPS my score was way better compared to T530 LCD.
georgemcbay 12y ago
There are lots of different kinds of LCD monitors. Using a TN LCD panel with an effective 6 bits per color channel and a compressed dynamic range would be the opposite of cheating, it would be playing with two hands tied behind your back, so to speak. Using a wide-gamut IPS panel that is properly calibrated would be more like "cheating" (though not actually cheating if your own color perception is really what you want to test, as in that case the monitor should reproduce color as accurately as possible).

mjs7231 12y ago

Perfect score! Test takes a bit of time, I got bored about half way through. I wonder how I would do on not a nice a monitor.

NaNaN 12y ago
Want more challenges? Try this: http://color.method.ac http://color.method.ac
- brute 12y ago
  Or try blendoku: http://www.blendoku.com/ http://www.blendoku.com/

lgmspb 12y ago

It gets trickier around 0.25 and 0.75, i wonder why?

smoyer 12y ago
Very true ... I got a patch of four incorrect on each of the four strips (for a score of 16) and they were all straddling either the 0.25 or 0.75 marks.

poopchute 12y ago

I already know that I'm colourblind, but if anyone else is curious what those results would look like; Here ya go: http://imgur.com/a/OgnuM http://imgur.com/a/OgnuM Something of interest that I noticed is the fairly constant gap between areas of low colour acuity

egeozcan 12y ago
I didn't concentrate too much but still wonder if my score of 49 is something I should be worried about? http://i.imgur.com/WqRonYi.png http://i.imgur.com/WqRonYi.png
- stan_rogers 12y ago
  Why worry about something you can't fix? (Unless, of course, your monitor, not your vision, is the problem.) Unless you "do colour" for a living and have wondered why clients aren't banging down your door, it's probably not a real-world problem for you. (If it was a problem severe enough to be a safety hazard or mangle your fashion sense to the point that a hypothetical Garanimals For Grownups might be helpful, you would probably be acutely aware of it by now.) Hell, there's even at least one "name" professional photographer (Joel Grimes) who would score worse than you did. (Your problem is relatively subtle, apart from a bit of a mess in the red/yellow/green transition. You would probably have some real difficulty distinguishing the yellows of an egg yolk, a buttercup and a lemon, or at least being able to spot them in isolation. As handicaps go, I've seen worse.)
  - egeozcan 12y ago
    Well, I also do front-end web development from time to time and when I do, maybe I should consider having much more external advice on design matters than before. I never thought I had any problems, that's what worried me. Thank you very much for the explanation.
- incision 12y ago
  I wouldn't put too much weight on it... I tried it without much effort on my so-so Dell desktop display and got 59. Tried again on my RMBP with even less effort and got 14. However, I did have trouble in the same places both times so it's certainly demonstrating something. Dell: http://imgur.com/MFvcSky http://imgur.com/MFvcSky RMBP: http://imgur.com/61WlVQS http://imgur.com/61WlVQS

antipod 12y ago

I got a perfect score (zero). The trick is to blur your vision.

throwwit 12y ago
...or tilt an lcd screen.

morl0ck 12y ago

Perfect ColorIQ http://grab.by/xGhe http://grab.by/xGhe

MisterBastahrd 12y ago

I remember this test! I outscored the entire art department at my workplace, with an uncalibrated monitor to boot. The worst scorer? The art director. He clocked in with a score of 37. Luckily, his job has a lot more to do with layout than color precision.

joshvm 12y ago

Perfect colour vision, actually quite surprised at that - some of the shades in the middle were very hard to distinguish. Performed on a 5 year old Macbook - assuming my Dell IPS panel make it easier.

fatbat 12y ago
Surprised I got a 0 as well! At some point I was not sure if my monitor color collaboration was off or I am seeing patterns.

kefka 12y ago

Hmm. I got 8 http://imgur.com/R4LkI3s http://imgur.com/R4LkI3s

adestefan 12y ago

Missed 4 in a row right in the green section.

lisch 12y ago

I love stuff like this. Reminds you that what you believe is "true" is rarely what other people may believe.

spacefight 12y ago

It's still beyond my understanding, on how Pantone could copyright their colorsets...

menacestudio 12y ago

Got a 6.

morbius 12y ago

I got a 4. Pretty terrible result for somebody as young as I am, but I suppose myopia and the the spectral aberration caused by eyeglasses makes it harder to distinguish colors. http://i.imgur.com/uLRW0YI.png http://i.imgur.com/uLRW0YI.png

josephschmoe 12y ago
I had a similar problem with a couple of them. They felt completely indistinguishable to me. Got a 3. A part of it is the fact this is on a computer monitor though. If you only got a few wrong, it's probably not a big deal.
- PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  Huh. So most of them were distinguishable to you? Interesting. I could tell a properly-placed color apart from the colors two or three spaces away from it, but not usually from its immediate neighbors. My main strategy was to assume that, if a color looked identical to each of its neighbors, it was in the right place. I got a 16, which seems decent enough.

PhasmaFelis 12y ago

The scoring is weird. It places your final result on a scale from 0 to 99, but just hitting Submit without changing anything produces a score in the 800-1100 range, and my "Highest score for your gender and age range" is 1520. Why doesn't the scale reflect actual values? How could someone score substantially worse than random? ...I think something is wrong with their best/worst scores, actually. About 80% of the age/gender brackets say the best is 0 and the worst is 1520, and that consistency is weird to begin with, but some have really dramatic outliers. Women aged 50-59 range from negative 162 to 410,378,090!

aaroninsf 12y ago

Is it just me, or is this for many people more a test of a) your capacity to stare at a screen without tearing up, blurring, etc. and b) the quality and color profile both native and gamut-corrected etc. of your monitor? I swear this is much more a test of my current monitor settings vs. ambient light conditions, than anything serious about my own color perception. A physical version with color chips and the option to work under a variety of lights (LED, halogen, CF, incandescent, sunlight...) at whim would be way more revealing. But yeah, harder to code in JS.

nardi 12y ago

I really hate how they show lowest and highest scores, and no median/mean/percentiles, or anything at all that would help you decide whether your score was good or bad.

cessor 12y ago
I noticed this as well, just giving the range is not really helpful. Also the scale is strange, 0 being the best. I was confused when I scored a 4...

cessor 12y ago

I liked this test. I am running a calibrated display, so I am assuming the display is not a factor. Remember to relax your eyes frequently, starring at a color for too long tires the cone cells and might affect your test results as a fatigue effect.

zacinbusiness 12y ago

I scored a 12 on an uncalibrated laptop display (late 2010 MacBook Air) so I don't think that's too poor for my age range (29). Still, I would have liked to see some median scores. My results: http://screencast.com/t/s5ohpINp http://screencast.com/t/s5ohpINp Also, by the end of the process I felt like I was going to be sick, not sure if it was the brightness (my eyes are extremely sensitive to light and I normally keep the brightness at 1 bar but I had it at full brightness for this).

hamburglar 12y ago
I don't think the calibration of your monitor has much to do with it, since the task is to sort colors relative to each other, not absolutely. In fact, after writing that first sentence, I tweaked the heck out of my monitor color settings (the r/g/b adjustments go from 0 to 100 with defaults at 50 and I increased my red to 73 and decreased my green to 37 -- it looked like hell) and was still able to score 16.
- zacinbusiness 12y ago
  Interesting! I would have thought the color "trueness" would have a lot more of an effect. But I guess the originator of the test took that into account.

Cerium 12y ago

I have taken this test several times over the years. I can score perfectly but if I make a mistake it is in the blue greens. I have fun running different sorting algorithms on the tiles. The trick to getting a perfect score is doing a pass where you switch every pair of adjacent tiles. This will double the color delta on the edges if the tile is correct and halve the delta if the position was wrong. I always catch at least a blue or two on this pass.

agf 12y ago

Interesting test. I got a 4, much better than I expected, on my RMBP. Anyone else here take the XKCD color survey back in 2010: http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ I was presented with an awful lot of colors I didn't have a better word for than "tan", "beige", "green", etc, so I expected that my "color acuity score" would be poor. Looks like I was having trouble without something to compare to, and having trouble naming, rather than having trouble identifying differences between shares. Good to know!

otoburb 12y ago

91. Still not sure whether that's good or bad given my age range. EDIT: Based on a brain damage study with 48 patients and 48 healthy controls "a total error score between 20 and 100 was taken as the range of normal competence for discrimination."[1] [1] http://www.perceptionweb.com/abstract.cgi?id=v990416 http://www.perceptionweb.com/abstract.cgi?id=v990416, "Scoring efficiency on the Farnsworth - Munsell 100-Hue test after brain damage"