The Blog

So you’re a photographer and you prefer the control of doing your own color corrections and you don’t have any color blindness that you are aware of. All should be great and color should just flow from one pixel to the next…. But wait, your recent client thinks they look too red and you disagree. Who’s to say who is wrong?

Here is a situation that you could avoid by knowing your personal color deficiencies. Most people have some range of color that they cannot see as well as others. The Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue Test (also known as the FM 100) is a commonly used vision test to find a persons areas of color deficiency. You simply line up the colors in a row from the first block to the last (those two are fixed points) in order to make the color transition from color to color as smooth as possible. (See image two as an example.)

Once you are done, click Score Test and it will graph the areas of color that you may have a problem seeing properly. If you don’t score well, perhaps you should let your lab handle color corrections for you from now on. If you score well, you should pat yourself on the back or give yourself a gold star for the day or something. (Ok, I joke.)

Go try it for yourself: X-Rite Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue Test

Here is what the test should look like if you have the colors lined up, ready to be scored.

And not to brag, here is my score. I’ve taken it a number of times before for my job so I guess that makes me a veteran to the test. FYI, A lower number is a better score.