Hermes_Trismegistus
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Munsell® Plant Tissue Color Chart
Does any current member have access to both a Munsell and a good quality scanner?
It is important, because an accurate rendition of this colour chart in an electronic format is more than just a valuable resource for amateur
botanists.
But it would allow a clever lad(or lass) to match the colour tiles to specific transmission wavelengths and perhaps concoct a scanning colorimeter
that would give outputs in the Munsell scale.
That would be a serious coup for amateur science.
Beyond my current abilities, but perhaps childsplay for someone else?
Arguing on the internet is like running in the special olympics; even if you win: you\'re still retarded.
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neutrino
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There is a slight problem with this plan. Although you may scan the colors in one way, they will almost certainly be displayed in quite another.
If you print them, the ink might be from one batch or the other. CRT displays seem to be relatively consistent, but they get dimmer and their colors
slowly change due to screen burn. Flat panel displays are the worst, though. A color PDA will give you a different color from any flat-panel computer
without exception. If you don’t believe me, try showing a shade of red on a PDA. You will be thoroughly disappointed when your computer’s monitor
shows bright crimson and your PDA shows pale rust.
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Hermes_Trismegistus
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Yes; there are difficulties.
it would take effort and cleverness to get there.
But the colour grading scheme is a mainstay of botany.
You can imagine how describing the leaves as "green in colour" becomes a little redundant.
And the book is two hundred bucks at the least.
Thats a problem. What is the solution?
There must be a solution, and if we turn your negative statements around and look for corresponding positives, then we have identified some
possibilities.
How to scan the tiles in so that the colour recorded is recorded as a specific ratio of rgb and how to read the RGB (red, green, blue)
How to ensure that the printout matches the tiles....What printer does the best job?
Perhaps if someone were to take a raw palette of tiles....that the print shop at a university would be unlikely to know were copyrighted, their
sophisticated printers would be able to take my data on disk and print out the bare palette.
Print shops live and dye (sic) by their printing consistency.
A person could then use another file with the tiles numeral designations to match one to the other.
Another positive is that the book is not very large. It is commonly sold as a small binder of cardboard sheets.
Arguing on the internet is like running in the special olympics; even if you win: you\'re still retarded.
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neutrino
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If you could somehow get a set of standard colors of standard hues, it might be possible to calibrate your printer to print the correct colors of your
monitor to display the right ones, kind of like calibrating a scale. I don’t know where you would obtain such a thing, as this is not my area of
expertise. I suppose this wouldn’t be useful when out in the field, but you could always scan the plants in with the same scanner used on the
original chart and compare the colors that way.
Another thought, how regular are the colors on the chart? By this I mean is there a set change from the color of one cell to the other like every next
cell is X shades redder? If there is, it shouldn’t be that hard to construct one yourself in something like MSPaint. Although you’d still need the
calibration.
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unionised
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You could calibrate it so it works on your printer, but when you send the data to someone else is there any guarantee that it will print out properly
on their printer?
I think you would have to use something that you can both get hold of to check this. Perhaps some nice big crystals of copper sulphate, pot dichromate
and nickel ammonium sulphate would do the trick. (OK, a bit tricky to fit in the scanner but they should work).
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Hermes_Trismegistus
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Munsell is the Moses of colour determination and standardization, in that he has led us to the promised land.
His colour charts are in every university library from Timbuktu to Tehran. Unfortunately they are almost always a reference only "no-remove from
library" book.
Arguing on the internet is like running in the special olympics; even if you win: you\'re still retarded.
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