Know Your Color IQ with This Online Color Challenge

Our perception of colors is often subjective and depends a lot on the brain’s response to the stimuli, whenever the light reacts with the cone cells in our eyes. There are even few color pairs that are impossible to see because their light frequencies cancel each other out in our eyes.

However, display manufacturers are competing to build TV screens and displays for mobile phones with the capability to recreate colors more accurately. Despite their efforts to offer wider color spectrum, it will not make much of a difference if you are a person having a color perception deficiency or colorblindness.

Although, if your job revolves around colors, or if you’re willing to know your color vision acuity, X-rite, the color management experts have developed a Hue Test that lets you see how perfectly your eyes can perceive color.

Based on the Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue Test, this online test from X-rite consists of 40 different colored blocks arranged along four rows in a random order. You have to drag and drop the blocks to arrange them by hue color.

But, if you are in a strict quest to find out about your vision, you can take a more complex test in which you will have 72 different blocks in their hue order.

Unlike other tests, if you score ‘0’ here, it means your vision is perfect. But, scoring a ‘0’ in the second test is not as easy as you may think.

One of the reasons is that staring at the blocks for a long time tires the eyes out and makes it hard to spot the variations in the hue. Also, there are some limitations to human vision because of the cones and rods present in the eyes that helps us to see colors ranging from red to green and to blue.

In addition, human eyes perceive some colors better compared to others. For example, we will be able to differentiate green and red color along the spectrum, but it’s quite difficult when it comes to blue.

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This is the reason why we feel comfortable to see the displays with more blue color, even when it produces less accurate colors. The more trouble we have to see a color the more pleasing it will be to our brain.

Since our eyes have more difficulty with the blue color, it will be difficult for us to match the blocks with shades of blue in it. A color perception deficiency will then make it even harder for our eyes to perceive the colors accurately.

As per X-Rite, it has been found that men have more difficulty in differentiating color variations along the spectrum than women. While one out of 255 women has some color perception deficiency, it is one out of 12 in a men’s case.

In addition, the difference in color perception is also due to the quality of electronic displays available in the market. Different displays use different technologies to produce different colors.

LCDs, LEDs, and OLEDs all produce a unique range of colors for the same content. As there are advances in technology, displays improve and tend to produce more accurate colors perceivable for a good eye.

But if the displays are too good, the colors produced will be on so narrow a spectrum that each person might perceive the same color differently.

The exact representation of colors by these advanced displays might be meaningful for the ones who have scored ‘0’ in the hue test, but these are of no use for those who failed.