Q: I heard that people can't look at a color in one room and then pick it out of a set of similar colors in the next room. But there are people with perfect pitch, so are there people with "perfect hue"?
A: "The short answer is no," said Mark D. Fairchild, director of the program of color science at the Munsell Color Science Laboratory of Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y.
"Color is almost always judged relative to other colors," Fairchild said, and the human ability to remember colors over any period of time, or even from room to room, is extremely poor.
"Based on memory alone, we can probably reliably identify tens of colors, with some people perhaps able to study hard and get up to a hundred or so," he said. "If we were to learn a systematic way to scale colors, we might be able to get up to several hundred."
If colors are compared side by side, however, "then we can easily distinguish several thousand colors, and some estimate more than a million," Fairchild said.
Such ability is somewhat analogous to differentiating tones in hearing, he said. Almost everyone can distinguish tones when they are compared in close succession, he said, but only a very small percentage of people have what is called perfect pitch or absolute pitch: the ability to recall and identify tones after a considerable period of time, without a reference tone for comparison.
"Unfortunately, color appearance seems to be even more difficult to remember," Fairchild said, "to the point that we don't speak of anyone as having perfect hue."
ActiveStyle on 05/25/2015