Just how well do you really know color? Take this test!

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posted Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 12:34 PM EDT

 
 

We've all done it. Spending hours in Photoshop or Lightroom, making tiny tweaks to the coloring and lighting of our photos. But with all of our playing with sliders, and twiddling the hue and saturation, how well do you actually know color? The color experts at X-Rite have something to test just that, with their Online Color Challenge.

You'll be presented with four lines of color squares, and all you have to do is arrange each row by hue. Simple, right?

Well, ten minutes and one headache later, it turns out that I have a pretty respectable score of 10 (lower is better), with some deficiencies in the blue/green space. You can see my final arrangement below — but no cheating!

If you want to give the test a try, a lot of how well you do is not just because of your eyes, but also how well calibrated and bright your monitor is. Steve Hullfish at Pro Video Coalition noted that if he tilted his MacBook Pro, he could make out the color differences better, which knocked his score down to a perfect 0. If nothing else, that should show just how important a well calibrated monitor is to accurately setting the colors in your images.

Let us know how well you did in the comments (and if it left you with a headache like it did me...)

(via Pro Video Coalition)